Radio Frequency and Visible Light Communication Internetworking

Visible light communication internetworking (VLC) is considered to be a promising network technology that can offer high data rates with almost no transmission power consumption. It suffers from some technical limitations that motivate its integration with RF network technologies to enhance the overall network performance. This chapter discusses RF and VLC integration in heterogeneous networks. It presents several integration objectives such as load balancing, throughput maximization and uplink data transmission. The chapter focuses on RF and VLC internetworking for green communications. It presents a radio resource allocation mechanism that can improve downlink energy efficiency in an integrated RF‐VLC network. The chapter demonstrates the superior performance of the heterogeneous integrated RF‐VLC network and compares with the benchmarks that support an RF‐only network or a heterogeneous network consisting of two RF systems, respectively.