Heterogeneous media communications for future wireless local area networks

Many media exist for communication, such as LTE, IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs), millimeter-wave communications, and visible light communications (VLCs), and a lot of research has been conducted to find methods to improve the performance of each medium. However, the use of a single medium for communication limits the performance upper bound that can be achieved by using more than one medium for communication. Moreover, some media are widely used, while others are not because their use cases are limited. Therefore, the more commonly used media still suffer from a lack of bandwidth, while bandwidth for other media types is abundant. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous media communications (HeMCOM) framework, where multiple media are used for leveraging the abundant bandwidth and increasing the total communication performance. HeMCOM focuses on leveraging the difference of the PHY and MAC characteristics of each medium. This paper summarizes the HeMCOM concept, introduces related works from the point of view of this concept, and discusses the possibility of using several types of media.