Fuzzy Based Network Assignment and Link-Switching Analysis in Hybrid OCC/LiFi System

In recent times, optical wireless communications (OWC) have become attractive research interest in mobile communication for its inexpensiveness and high-speed data transmission capability and it is already recognized as complementary to radio-frequency (RF) based technologies. Light fidelity (LiFi) and optical camera communication (OCC) are two promising OWC technologies that use a photo detector (PD) and a camera, respectively, to receive optical pulses. These communication systems can be implemented in all kinds of environments using existing light-emitting diode (LED) infrastructures to transmit data. However, both networking layers suffer from several limitations. An excellent solution to overcoming these limitations is the integration of OCC and LiFi. In this paper, we propose a hybrid OCC and LiFi architecture to improve the quality-of-service (QoS) of users. A network assignment mechanism is developed for the hybrid system. A dynamic link-switching technique for efficient handover management between networks is proposed afterward which includes switching provisioning based on user mobility and detailed network switching flow analysis. Fuzzy logic (FL) is used to develop the proposed mechanisms. A time-division multiple access (TDMA) based approach, called round-robin scheduling (RRS), is also adopted to ensure fairness in time resource allocation while serving multiple users using the same LED in the hybrid system. Furthermore, simulation results are presented taking different practical application scenarios into consideration. The performance analysis of the network assignment mechanism, which is provided at the end of the paper, demonstrates the importance and feasibility of the proposed scheme.