Event-Triggered Adaptive Handover for Centralized Hybrid VLC/MMW Networks

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) builds upon the dual use of LED-based lighting infrastructure for data transmission. It is particularly attractive for user-dense environments and mainly positioned as a complementary wireless access technology to radio-frequency (RF) counterparts. The practical implementation of hybrid light/radio access networks requires the design of efficient vertical and horizontal handover mechanisms to exploit their complementary features. In this paper, we propose an event-triggered adaptive handover mechanism for centralized hybrid VLC/millimeter wave (MMW) systems. Unlike distributed architectures where all the functionalities are deployed in each access point (AP), the centralized systems allow better optimization of network parameters due to awareness of global network view. The proposed handover mechanism takes advantage of this architecture and uses offset-enhanced signal-to-interference plus noise ratio levels of APs as performance metrics. To ensure balanced distribution of user equipment (UE) numbers between two underlying technologies, it auto-tunes the offset variables using rule-set based algorithms based on the number of connected UEs and data rates as inputs. Our results demonstrate that the proposed handover mechanism significantly improves hybrid system performance via adaptive tuning of AP selection parameter while minimizing signaling overhead.