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A Hybrid Application-Aware VHO Scheme for Coexisting VLC and WLAN Indoor Networks

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Abstract

In spite of several promising attributes that motivate industry players to adopt visible light communication (VLC), its strong coverage limitation is a major disincentive. A reasonable way to overcome this bottleneck in indoor environments is to capitalize on the prevailing wireless local area network (WLAN) to boost reliable mobile access. To this end, a vertical handover (VHO) scheme is required to smoothly merge VLC networks and WLANs. Thus, this article presents an adaptive VHO scheme which considers the cause of a VLC link disruption and the types of applications running in a user device (UD) to make appropriate handover decisions. The proposed hybrid application-aware VHO (HA-VHO) technique combines three approaches (immediate handover, static dwell timing and dynamic dwell timing), in order to improve the overall handover outcome. Performance comparisons with other VHO designs (immediate VHO, dwell VHO and channel adaptive dwell VHO) reveal that the HA-VHO scheme provides higher data rates in most cases, while adaptively reducing the total signaling cost of inter-network handovers. What is more, it can provide relatively high quality of experience (QoE) for real-time applications.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Key Research and Development Plan of Jiangsu Province (BE2018108), National Natural Science Foundation of China (61772243), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20170557), Open Research Fund of National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University (2018D13) and The Young Talent Project of Jiangsu University.

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  1. Andrews A. Okine

    Present address: Department of Electrical Engineering, École de technologie supérieure, Université du Québec, Montreal, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Communication Engineering, Jiangsu University, 301 Xuefu Road, Zhenjiang, 212013, People’s Republic of China

    Andrews A. Okine, Xu Bao, Janice Mongoungou, Winfred Adjardjah & Wence Zhang

  2. Department of Electrical/Electronic Engineering, Takoradi Technical University, Takoradi, Ghana

    Winfred Adjardjah

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Okine, A.A., Bao, X., Mongoungou, J. et al. A Hybrid Application-Aware VHO Scheme for Coexisting VLC and WLAN Indoor Networks. J Netw Syst Manage 30, 52 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-022-09666-4

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