QoS-driven load balancing in hybrid LiFi and WiFi networks

This work studies the quality of service (QoS) performance of wireless networks that integrate light fidelity (LiFi) and wireless fidelity (WiFi). While the hybrid network is potential for improving network capacity, load balancing becomes essential and challenging due to the nature of heterogeneous access points (APs). A number of studies have been conducted to address this issue, focusing on maximising the network capacity with user fairness constraints. However, in practice, QoS metrics including packet loss ratio and latency are important to network services. In this paper, QoS-driven load balancing is studied for hybrid LiFi and WiFi networks (HLWNets) in two scenarios: single-AP association (SA) and multi-AP association (MA). In each case, an optimisation problem is formulated to minimise the packet loss ratio and latency, and a low-complexity iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. Results show that the novel methods, especially MA, can effectively balance the traffic loads among the APs and improve the QoS performance. In addition, the more subflows the better performance MA provides. Targeting the same level of QoS, MA can achieve a system throughput up to 160% higher than the signal strength strategy and 130% higher than the proportional fairness load balancing.