Framework of IoT Services over Unidirectional Visible Lights Communication Networks

Abstract

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has been noted as an emerging technology for communications in wireless local area networks. VLC provides some distinctive features over the conventional wireless access technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or ZigBee. The most prominent feature of VLC is that it can provide more exact location information, since it is based on a particular light. In addition, VLC can reduce the frequency interferences from numerous wireless channels, since it uses a completely different radio frequency channel from the conventional wireless access technologies. Thus, VLC can be used for Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. Nevertheless, up to now, not enough studies on how to provide IoT services over VLC networks have been conducted. In this paper, we propose a framework to provide IoT services in VLC networks. In particular, we will consider the unidirectional VLC network, in which the downlink channel from the VLC transmitter to the VLC receiver is given by using VLC communication, whereas the uplink channel from the VLC receiver to the VLC transmitter is implemented by using another wireless access technology, such as Wi-Fi. This is because most of the VLC receivers, such as mobile phones, cannot support the uplink VLC communication. Based on the framework of IoT services over unidirectional VLC, in this paper, we also propose the VLC–IoT protocol (VIP) which is an application layer protocol for data transport with the session management functionality that can be used to effectively provide IoT services among IoT servers, VLC transmitters and VLC receivers in the networks. The proposed VIP protocol is implemented by using the Cooja simulator. For performance analysis, the proposed scheme is compared with the existing CoAP-based scheme that does not provide the session management. From a variety of simulation experiments, we see that the proposed scheme can provide lower data transmission and handover delays, compared to the existing scheme.