VLC network topology design for seamless communication in a urban tunnel

Abstract

Visible Light Communications networks are usually based on isolated access points which deals individually with the handover strategy. Basically when a node is detected by an access point the network’s protocol upper layers redirect the traffic to the new access point. This strategy cannot be suitable for vehicle communications and different alternatives of handover should be developed. In this paper, a new network architecture is presented including a novel handover scheme based on distributed receivers. This system has been tested for vehicle to infrastructure applications in a tunnel scenario and results show that, in comparison with classical scheme, it demonstrates an upgrade in general performance.