Solving the LEDs placement problem in indoor VLC system using a hybrid coronavirus herd immunity optimizer

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) is a developing technology enabling simultaneous illumination and communication between users. This is achieved by employing light emitting diodes (LEDs) as transmitters and photo-detectors (PDs) as receivers. In indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems, a significant challenge is the deployment of a various number of LEDs that accommodate different numbers of users. This particular problem falls under the category of Non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard), making it difficult to find exact solutions in a reasonable amount of time. As a result, employing approximation approaches, particularly meta-heuristics, proves to be a suitable and effective way to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach (ICHIO-FA) based on the combination of improved coronavirus herd immunity optimizer (ICHIO) with firefly algorithm (FA) for solving the LEDs placement problem in an indoor VLC system. In the proposed ICHIO-FA algorithm, the chaotic map concept is adopted to increase the chaotic stochastic behavior of the CHIO. Moreover, the opposition-based learning (OBL) mechanism is applied to enhance the convergence speed of CHIO and explore the search space effectively. Finally, FA is used as a local search method for ICHIO to avoid trapping into local optima. The effectiveness of the proposed ICHIO-FA algorithm is tested on several scenarios under different settings, taking into account the throughput and user coverage metrics. Simulation results demonstrate the accuracy and superiority of the ICHIO-FA approach in finding optimal LEDs positions when compared with the standard CHIO, FA, particle swarm optimization (PSO), genetic algorithm (GA), marine predators algorithm (MPA), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), manta ray foraging optimization (MRFO), bat algorithm (BA), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), and simulated annealing (SA).