Performance evaluation of hybrid VLC using device cost and power over data throughput criteria

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) technology has attained its attention in both academic and industry lately. It is determined by the development of light emitting diode (LED) technology for solid-state lighting (SSL).It has great potential to gradually replace radio frequency (RF) wireless technology because it offers unregulated and unlicensed bandwidth to withstand future demand of indoor wireless access to real–time bandwidth-demanding applications. However, it was found to provide intrusive uplink channel that give rise to unpleasant irradiance from the user device which could interfere with the downlink channel of VLC and hence limit mobility to users as a result of small coverage (field of view of VLC).To address this potential problem, a Hybrid VLC system which integrates VLC (for downlink) and RF (for uplink) technology is proposed. It offers a non-intrusive RF back channel that provides high throughput VLC and maintains durability with conventional RF devices. To deploy Hybrid VLC system in the market, it must be energy and cost saving to attain its equivalent economical advantage by comparing to existing architecture that employs fluorescent or LED lights with RF technology. In this paper, performance evaluation on the proposed hybrid system was carried out in terms of device cost and power consumption against data throughput. Based on our simulation, Hybrid VLC system was found to reduce device cost by 3% and power consumption by 68% when compares to fluorescent lights with RF technology. Nevertheless, when it is compared to LED lights with RF technology, our proposed hybrid system is found to achieve device cost saving as high as 47% and reduced power consumption by 49%. Such promising results have demonstrated that Hybrid VLC system is a feasible solution and has paved the way for greater cost saving and energy efficient compares with the current RF architecture even with the increasing requirement of indoor area coverage.