Abstract
Wireless communications refer to data transmissions in unguided propagation media through the use of wireless carriers such as radio frequency (RF) and visible light (VL) waves. The rising demand for high data rates, especially, in indoor scenarios, overloads conventional RF technologies. Therefore, technologies such as millimeter waves (mmWave) and cognitive radios have been adopted as possible solutions to overcome the spectrum scarcity and capacity limitations of the conventional RF systems. In parallel, visible light communication (VLC) has been proposed as an alternative solution, where a light source is used for both illumination and data transmission. In comparison to RF links, VLC links present a very high bandwidth that allows much higher data rates. VLC exhibits also immunity to interference from electromagnetic sources, has unlicensed channels, is a very low power consumption system, and has no health hazard. VLC is appealing for a wide range of applications including reliable communications with low latency such as vehicle safety communication. Despite the major advantages of VLC technology and a variety of its applications, its use has been hampered by its cons such as its dependence on a line of sight connectivity. Recently, hybrid RF/VLC systems were proposed to take advantage of the high capacity of VLC links and better connectivity of RF links. Thus, hybrid RF/VLC systems are envisioned as a key enabler to improve the user rates and mobility on one hand and to optimize the capacity, interference and power consumption of the overall network on the other hand. This paper seeks to provide a detailed survey of hybrid RF/VLC systems. This paper represents an overview of the current developments in the hybrid RF/VLC systems, their benefits and limitations for both newcomers and expert researchers.
Highlights
Wireless communication systems have undergone many changes and developments since their inception that coincide with the discovery of electromagnetic waves (EM) and wireless telegraph to the present day as advanced technologies such as smartphones, connected vehicles and the Internet of Things (IoT) became widely available
The different radio frequency (RF) systems used in RF/visible light communication (VLC) systems studies can be classified in the following categories: 1) wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) Wi-Fi is a wireless communication technology that refers to the IEEE communications standards for wireless local area networks (i.e., IEEE 802.11) and was created in 1997
The idea of having a dynamic and reconfigurable network that can support both RF and VLC is being adopted by a lot of studies and researchers in recent years
Summary
Wireless communication systems have undergone many changes and developments since their inception that coincide with the discovery of electromagnetic waves (EM) and wireless telegraph to the present day as advanced technologies such as smartphones, connected vehicles and the Internet of Things (IoT) became widely available. Yang et al in [40] discussed the idea of integrating visible light communication and positioning to assist in 5G networks for Internet of Things devices where macrocell and picocell provide coverage and reliability in RF spectrum, and optical attocell provide the high-speed transmission and highaccuracy positioning services. This survey focuses on achieving the following goals: 1) Highlighting the design aspects of VLC systems such as channel modeling, system performance, advantages, and limitations. Nomenclature and key symbols used in the paper are summarized at the end of the paper
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