Bit-Level Soft-Switching Transmission for Heterogeneous VLC-RF OFDM Systems

Heterogeneous transmission architecture of parallel visible light communication (VLC) system and radio frequency (RF) system can significantly improve the communication rate and fully exploit the channel advantages. However, the existing schemes are often the hard switching transmission, which fails to aggregate VLC and RF system, thus losing potential communication capacity. In this paper, a bit-level soft switching VLC-RF heterogeneous transmission algorithm is proposed, and the theoretical achievable rate is deduced based on the space-frequency two-dimensional water-filling strategy, which is also verified by prototype experiments. Especially for the harsh communication scenario with a damaged single link, the proposed heterogeneous architecture has robust transmission, and the achievable rate can be increased by about 400% compared to the damaged link.