User association with lighting constraints in visible light communication systems

The user association problem for light emitting diode (LED)-based visible light communication (VLC) systems is investigated in this paper. Unlike its counterpart in other RF communication systems, the LED-based VLC system has unique lighting constraints which have to be satisfied when making user association decisions. This work establishes a utility maximization framework for VLC user association with lighting constraints. The optimization problem is shown to be non-convex mixed integer, and hence is very difficult to solve. Two sub-optimal solutions are proposed and their performance is analyzed, one based on a greedy heuristic and the other based on a convex relaxation. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solutions.