A novel link switching scheme using pre-scanning and RSS prediction in visible light communication networks

Visible light communication (VLC) is gaining increasing attention and is considered as a promising technology for future wireless indoor communications. Because movable users expect a seamless connectivity experience when switching among transmitters (i.e., VLC access points) in the VLC system, fast link switching operations must be supported by the networks. This paper presents a novel hard link switching scheme for VLC networks with the use of pre-scanning and received signal strength (RSS) prediction. Our proposed scheme achieves the advantages of both conventional hard and soft link switching schemes without changing device hardware or the IEEE 802.15.7 medium access control (MAC) protocol. To help compare our proposed scheme with conventional hard and soft link switching schemes, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), the outage probability regarding the link switching situation, and the queuing models for link switching schemes are taken into account. Simulation and numerical results validate that our proposed scheme outperforms conventional hard and soft link switching schemes.