Exploring the Effect of Optical Beams on Hybrid VLC/RF Transmission Characteristics

Abstract

The hybrid visible light communication/radio frequency (VLC/RF) transmission system could offer consistent coverage and high throughput, which are inherited from the VLC and RF link components separately. However, almost all current hybrid VLC/RF schemes are limited in scenarios adopting light emitting diodes (LED) sources with basic Lambertian optical beams, and fail to investigate the scenarios using sources with distinct non-Lambertian optical beams. For exploring this effect of optical beams on hybrid VLC/RF transmission performance, typical symmetric and non-symmetric optical beams are introduced to constitute representative non-Lambertian VLC/RF links. Moreover, the heterogeneous optical beams-based hybrid VLC/RF transmission scheme is proposed and estimated under a hard switching mechanism. Numerical results show that, compared with an approximate 234.39 Mbps maximum throughput of the conventional hybrid Lambertian VLC/RF configuration, the counterparts of the hybrid non-Lambertian VLC/RF configuration with the Rebel and NSPW optical beams are 203.39 Mbps and 279.34 Mbps, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed heterogeneous beams-based hybrid scheme is applied via Lambertian and non-Lambertian candidate beams, with the average throughput increased to 186.45 Mbps from the original approximate 174.14 Mbps of the conventional Lambertian hybrid VLC/RF configuration.

Keywords

• optical beams
• non-Lambertian beam patterns
• visible light communications
• hybrid VLC/RF communications
• link characteristics