Li-Wi: An upper layer hybrid VLC-WiFi network handover solution

Abstract

Visible light communications (VLC) as a wireless communication technology complementing the radio frequency-based wireless fidelity (WiFi). The hybrid VLC/WiFi, offers the best of both worlds, which are of particular interested in vehicular VLC (V-VLC) that have not yet been explored yet. In this paper, we propose an upper layer hybrid VLC-WiFi network handover solution known as “Li-Wi” to address the handover issues in V-VLC due to the mobility, shadowing, and obstacles. Li-Wi utilizes the benefits of high data rates and link availability of VLC and WiFi, respectively. It offers robust connectivity with lower handover outage duration (Thod) and a high network throughput. Based on experimental evaluation results using a small-scale prototype, we demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach. Our experiments reveal that, in an indoor vehicular network Li-Wi is highly efficient in minimizing (Thod) to 0.03 and 0.06 s for horizontal and vertical handovers, respectively.