Self-organising interference coordination in optical wireless networks

In this article, self-organising interference management for optical wireless networks deployed inside an aircraft cabin is investigated. A user that has received data in a given frame and intends to continue receiving data in the next frame broadcasts a busy burst (BB) in a time-multiplexed BB slot. The tagged access point (AP) intending to reuse a resource reserved in a neighbouring cell must listen to the BB slot. Provided that channel reciprocity holds, the tagged AP infers (prior to transmission) the amount of co-channel interference (CCI) potentially caused towards the victim user in neighbouring cell. This is a vital information for an AP to decide without any central supervision whether to transmit or defer the transmission to another time or frequency slot so as to limit CCI caused to the active link to a threshold value. Simulation results demonstrate that the BB approach significantly improves both fairness and spectral efficiency in the system compared to a static resource partitioning approach.