Self-adaptive medium access control protocol for aggregated VLC-RF wireless networks

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging technology that uses light rays in the range of 380?740 nm for signal propagation at a high data rate compared to radio frequency (RF). Nevertheless, it is not realistic to achieve full-duplex communication in VLC because of challenges such as glare, line-of-sight transmission requirement, interference, and energy constraint. Infrared or RF can complement VLC in order to achieve full-duplex communication. However, aggregated VLC?RF networks cannot be realized without addressing challenges such as network addressing and medium access control (MAC). In this study, we present the self adaptive medium access control (SA-MAC) protocol for aggregated VLC?RF wireless networks. The aim of our study is to minimize network delay, energy consumption, and collision while increasing throughput. By leveraging the CSMA/CA and sub-carrier orthogonality we model the SA-MAC protocol for aggregated VLC? RF wireless networks and we demonstrate the discrete Markov chain model that shows the states of a node in SA-MAC. Finally, we simulate our protocol in NS3 simulator then we compare simulation results with the Markov chain results and other existing protocols in the literature such as the carrier sense multiple access with collision detection hidden node avoidance (CSMA/CD-HA) and dynamic contention window-based successive transmission (DCW-ST). Numerical results from simulation and Markov chain model converge, especially when the number of node increases. Furthermore, the results from our study show that the proposed protocol increases network performance significantly.