A QoE-maximization-based vertical handover scheme for VLC heterogeneous networks

Xu Bao,Jinsheng Dai,Wence Zhang,Andrews A Okine,Winfred Adjardjah

doi:10.1186/s13638-018-1284-1

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC), not only provides indoor illumination, but also offers broadband connection. It has the benefits of huge bandwidth, high security, low cost, and health safety. However, duplex communication, user mobility, and seamless coverage are becoming challenging tasks in VLC networks. A VLC heterogeneous network (VLC-HetNet) that combines VLC and existing radio networks, in which a good vertical handover (VHO) scheme is critical to guarantee continuous transmission, has been proposed to solve these problems. In this paper, we propose a new VHO scheme to maximize the quality of experience (QoE) of a user. When a user makes a handover between VLC and the RF network, the influence on the user’s QoE may be positive (defined as the QoE profit) or negative (the reduced QoE value is defined as the handover cost). The handover decision is made in order to enhance the QoE and reduce the handover cost of the user, by formulating the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). The simulation results show that the proposed VHO scheme is adaptive to user movement and achieves a relatively high average QoE, low handover failure probability, and few handover times.

Highlights

Data consumption in wireless networks is undergoing a drastic increase due to the upsurge in demand for mobile and multimedia services and their applications
When λ increases, the average quality of experience (QoE) of all the schemes decreases because user equipment (UE) can only send access and handover requests via the radio frequency (RF) links
An increase in the RF-UE arrival rate fills the uplink queue of the RF access point (AP) and substantially increases the handover delay, which leads to a decrease in the QoE performance

Summary

Introduction

Data consumption in wireless networks is undergoing a drastic increase due to the upsurge in demand for mobile and multimedia services and their applications. This increase has pushed the radio frequency (RF)-based wireless technologies to their limits, and the spectrum is already allocated under license [1]. Visible light communication (VLC) utilizes low-cost lightemitting diodes (LEDs) as transmitters and p-intrinsic-n (PIN) photodiodes (PDs) as receivers. VLC is an option to overcome the crowded radio spectrum for wireless communication networks [2]. VLC has some benefits over RF technology: tremendous bandwidth, high data rate, noninterference nature, energy efficiency, and high security. One defect in VLC is the limited coverage area

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Results

Conclusion