A pre-scanning-based link switching scheme in visible light communication networks

Along with the evolution of cellular communication systems, the development of new wireless access technologies has been emerged strongly since the last decade. Recently, visible light communication (VLC) has been expected as a promising communication technology in the near future. To make VLC be soon commercialized, link switching is one of key issues that need to be solved effectively. This paper presents a novel hard link switching scheme for VLC networks using pre-scanning and received signal strength (RSS) prediction. Our proposed scheme achieves both hard link switching and soft link switching advantages without changing device hardware and IEEE 802.15.7 medium access control (MAC) protocol. The proposed scheme is expected as a possible candidate for practical link switching implementation.