Resource allocation exploiting reflective surfaces to minimize the outage probability in VLC

Visible light communication (VLC) is a technology that complements radio frequency (RF) to fulfill the ever-increasing demand for wireless data traffic. The ubiquity of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), exploited as transmitters, increases the VLC market penetration and positions it as one of the most promising technologies to alleviate the spectrum scarcity of RF. However, VLC deployment is hindered by blockage causing connectivity outages in the presence of obstacles. Recently, optical reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ORISs) have been considered to mitigate this problem. While prior works exploit ORISs for data or secrecy rate maximization, this paper studies the optimal placement of mirrors and ORISs, and the LED power allocation, for jointly minimizing the outage probability while keeping the lighting standards. We describe an optimal outage minimization framework and present solvable heuristics. We provide extensive numerical results and show that the use of ORISs may reduce the outage probability by up to 67% with respect to a no-mirror scenario and provide a gain of hundreds of kbit/J in optical energy efficiency with respect to the presented benchmark.