Abstract
Light Fidelity (LiFi) is a new candidate for wireless networking that utilizes the visible light spectrum and exploits the existing lighting infrastructure in the form of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). It provides point-to-point and point-to-multipoint communication on a bidirectional channel at very high data rates. However, the LiFi has small coverage, and its optical gain is closely related to the receiver’s directionality vis-à-vis the transmitter, therefore it can experience frequent service outages. To provide reliable coverage, the LiFi is integrated with other networking technologies such as wireless fidelity (WiFi) thus forming a hybrid system. The hybrid LiFi/WiFi system faces many challenges including but not limited to seamless integration with the WiFi, support for mobility, handover management, resource sharing, and load balancing. The existing literature has addressed one or the other aspect of the issues facing LiFi systems. There are limited free source tools available to holistically address these challenges in a scalable manner. To this end, we have developed an open-source simulation framework based on the network simulator 3 (ns-3), which realizes critical aspects of the LiFi wireless network. Our developed ns-3 LiFi framework provides a fully functional AP equipped with the physical layer and medium access control (MAC), a mobility model for the user device, and integration between LiFi and WiFi with a handover facility. Simulation results are produced to demonstrate the mobility and handover capabilities, and the performance gains from the LiFi-WiFi hybrid system in terms of packet delay, throughput, packet drop ratio (PDR), and fairness between users. The source code of the framework is made available for the use of the research community.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, there has been exponential growth in the number of mobile devices
The Light Fidelity (LiFi) channel gain is affected by multiple factors such as the angle of arrival (AOA), which is heavily affected by the user device orientation, the angle of emission at the transmitter (Tx), and the user device field of view (FOV)
The higher layer medium access control (MAC) class, named as Mac_Rx, in the LiFi user device is provided with a receive method that parses beacon frames, and if the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is above a certain threshold, it sends a response containing its MAC address and the quality of service (QoS) requirements
Summary
Over the last two decades, there has been exponential growth in the number of mobile devices. The proposed work provides point-to-point communication, error, and SNR models It cannot provide fully functional LiFi APs capable of providing multiuser access, offer bidirectional communication, support for user mobility with orientation changes, handover facility, and integration with WiFi. Our developed open-source framework implements all the critical features of a scalable LiFi-WiFi system. Our developed open-source framework implements all the critical features of a scalable LiFi-WiFi system It provides a physical layer, a MAC layer implementation in the form of TDMA, the ability to associate users with the AP, mobility modeling, a handover scheme between LiFi and WiFi APs, and a centralized controller to store information about the networking devices.
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