A Novel Handover Mechanism for Visible Light Communication Network

Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging technology and considered as an alternative to overcome some of the disadvantages of radio frequency communication technology in an indoor environment. However, the line of sight nature of the technology limits the user mobility and create new challenges to provides seamless network coverage under user mobility scenarios. In VLC multi access points and multi cell based network, co channel interference (CCI) between neighbor cells limits the overall performance. Therefore, by following the already existing VLC handover systems, this statistical parameter based novel handover method is designed. This paper proposes a handover mechanism for indoor VLC systems by introducing cell ID bits and statistical kurtosis values of the cell ID waveforms as metric for the handover initiation. As advantage of the method, effects from the CCI can be eliminate when measuring signal strengths in the signal overlapping cell boundary area. Also the handover criteria are adoptive to the different ambient lighting conditions compared to existing pre-configured light intensity threshold based handover systems. With the use of bit error rate (BER), the experiment results showed that Kurtosis value of the cell ID waveforms can be used as metric to initiate network handover in indoor VLC systems.