Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based User Association in Hybrid LiFi/WiFi Indoor Networks

--Hybrid light fidelity (LiFi) and wireless fidelity (WiFi) indoor networks has been envisioned as a promising technology to alleviate radio frequency spectrum crunch to accommodate the ever-increasing data rate demand in indoor scenarios. The hybrid LiFi/WiFi indoor networks can leverage the advantages of fast data transmission from LiFi and wider coverage of WiFi, thus complementing well with each other and further improving the network performance compared with the standalone networks. However, to leverage the co-existence, several challenges should be addressed, including but not limited to user association, mobility support, and efficient resource allocation. Therefore, the objective of the paper is to design a new user-access point association algorithm to maximize the sum throughput of the hybrid networks. We first mathematically formulate the sum data rate maximization problem by determining the AP selection for each user in indoor networks with consideration of user mobility and practical capacity limitations, which is a nonconvex binary integer programming problem. T o solve this problem, we then propose a sequential-proximal policy optimization (S-PPO) based deep reinforcement learning method. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed method by comparing it with exhaustive search (ES), signal strength strategy (SSS), and trust region policy optimization (TRPO) methods. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that our solution algorithm can outperform SSS by about 32.25% of the sum throughput and 19.09% of the fairness on average, and outperform TRPO by about 10.34% and 10.23%, respectively. Over the past few years, the usage of the internet has been continuously increasing. According to the latest data, people spend an average of 6 hours and 58 minutes daily on screens connected to the internet [1]. Moreover, an increasing number of applications require high-speed support, such as video calls, VR gaming, streaming media, and so on. However, we are facing a global digital divide, i.e., internet speeds in urban areas are often much faster than in rural areas, due to the generally less developed internet infrastructure in rural locations. Visible light communication (VLC), where light-emitting diodes (LEDs) can be used to transmit data by optical spectrum, has been envisioned as a promising solution for last-mile access because of its high bandwidth, enhanced security, electromagnetic interference-free nature, and easy integration with existing infrastructure [2]-[7].