Design and Analysis of a Hybrid Radio Frequency and Visible Light Communication System.

In this paper, a hybrid radio frequency (RF) and visible light communication (VLC) system is considered. A hybrid system with multiple VLC access points (APs) and RF APs is designed and analyzed. In indoor environments, VLC APs provide very high data rates whilst proving illumination, and RF APs offer ubiquitous coverage with moderate data rates. Since VLC networks piggyback on existing lighting infrastructures, they may not always be able to provide full coverage despite supporting very high data rates in some areas. Hence in practical deployments, the standalone VLC networks should be augmented in order to improve the per user data rate coverage. In this context, RF APs can be used to improve the per user rate coverage of VLC networks as well as to provide the ubiquitous control functionalities. In this paper, a simple RF deployment is proposed in order to improve the per user outage data rate performance of standalone VLC networks. It is assumed that the VLC system resources are fixed, and this paper quantifies the minimum spectrum and power requirements for a RF system, which after introduction to the VLC system, the hybrid RF/VLC system achieves certain per user rate coverage performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]