Relay-aided Device-to-Device (D2D) communication combining visible light communication (VLC) with radio frequency (RF) is a promising paradigm in the internet of things (IoT). Static relay limits the flexibility and maintaining connectivity of relays in Hybrid VLC/RF IoT systems. By using a drone as a relay station, it is possible to avoid obstacles such as buildings and to communicate in a line-of-sight (LoS) environment, which naturally aligns with the requirement of VLC Systems. To further support the application of VLC in the IoT, subject to the challenges imposed by the constrained coverage, the lack of flexibility, poor reliability, and connectivity, drone relay-aided D2D communication appears on the horizon and can be cost-effectively deployed for the large-scale IoT. This paper proposes a joint resource allocation and drones relay selection scheme, aiming to maximize the D2D system sum rate while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) requirements for cellular users (CUs) and D2D users (DUs). First, we construct a two-phase coalitional game to tackle the resource allocation problem, which exploits the combination of VLC and RF, as well as incorporates a greedy strategy. After that, a distributed cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm, called WoLF policy hill-climbing (WoLF-PHC), is proposed to address the drones relay selection problem. Moreover, to further reduce the computational complexity, we propose a lightweight neighbor–agent-based WoLF-PHC algorithm, which only utilizes historical information of neighboring DUs. Finally, we provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of the proposed schemes in terms of complexity and signaling overhead. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed schemes can effectively improve the system performance in terms of the sum rate and outage probability with respect to other outstanding algorithms.
This paper studies beam allocation and power optimization scheme to decrease the hardware cost and downlink power consumption of a multiuser millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. Our target is to improve energy efficiency (EE) and decrease power consumption without obvious system performance loss. To this end, we propose a beam allocation and power optimization scheme. First, the problem of beam allocation and power optimization is formulated as a multivariate mixed-integer non-linear programming problem. Second, due to the non-convexity of this problem, we decompose it into two sub-problems which are beam allocation and power optimization. Finally, the beam allocation problem is solved by using a convex optimization technique. We solve the power optimization problem in two steps. First, the non-convex problem is converted into a convex problem by using a quadratic transformation scheme. The second step implements Lagrange dual and sub-gradient methods to solve the optimization problem. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs almost identical to the exhaustive search (ES) method, while the greedy beam allocation and suboptimal beam allocation methods are far from the ES. Furthermore, experiment results demonstrated that our proposed algorithm outperforms the compared the greedy beam allocation method and the suboptimal beam allocation scheme in terms of average service ratio.