Performance of Hybrid RF-VLC Systems at High Density Areas

Hybrid radio frequency (RF)-visible light communication (VLC) systems have played an important role in solving many of the limitations that face traditional RF systems, including providing a widely used spectrum, higher channel capacity, minimum interference, and secure data transfer. In this paper, a downlink hybrid RF-VLC system is studied in dense areas in terms of interference and channel capacity for aggregate RF-VLC systems. MATLAB and Wireless In-site simulation programs are used to measure the interference and the channel capacity. The results showed that indoor wireless communication system for dense areas requires more RF access points (APs), which leads to more interference due to the limited non-overlapped channels. This leads to degradation in the performance of the services. However, the number of VLC APs in the VLC system is governed by the lighting design and thus, will not affect on the performance of the communication systems. The channel capacity for the aggregate system achieves 0.9 and 0.3 Gbps in the regions where the RF system was not affected by the neighboring cells and in the overlapping affected channel, respectively. In the aggregate RF-VLC system, a quality of service (QoS) algorithm is proposed to improve the overall performance of the network.