VRMAC: A novel WLAN medium access control mechanism using LEDs and a camera

This paper presents a novel medium access control (MAC) mechanism for wireless local area network (WLAN) systems, called visual recognition based medium access control (VRMAC) mechanism. VRMAC exploits Wi-Fi and visible light communications techniques, using LEDs and a camera to facilitate collision-less medium access with low overhead. In VRMAC, stations (STAs) equipped with LEDs send medium-access request messages by blinking their LEDs and an access point (AP) equipped with a camera receives the messages via the camera. In this paper, we introduce the fundamentals of the mechanism and present an example protocol. Our simulation results indicate that the mechanism improves WLAN throughput over that of the conventional MAC mechanism in WLANs.