Towards a Throughput and Energy Efficient Association Strategy for Wi-Fi/LiFi Heterogeneous Networks

In very dense or ultra-dense scenarios wherein Wi-Fi alone may not be enough to accommodate the needs of all stations, LiFi (Light Fidelity) access points can help alleviate the strain on the Wi-Fi by offloading some Wi-Fi traffic to LiFi. We study the issue of associating stations in a Wi-Fi/LiFi heterogeneous network composed of a Wi-Fi access point and multiples LiFi access points. We propose a conceptually simple and easy to implement solution to search and find an efficient mapping for the associations between stations and access points using analytical performance models for the individual throughput of each station and for the overall network energy consumption. Using two realistic deployments of heterogeneous networks for offices, we have evaluated the effectiveness of our solution at discovering better trade-offs than baseline strategies. Our numerical results show that significant gains can be obtained in terms of the throughput of the stations as well as overall energy consumption.