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

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.