Analysis of area data rate with shadowing effects in Li-Fi and RF hybrid network

Light Fidelity (LiFi) uses light emitting diodes (LEDs) for high speed wireless communications. Since employing a different range of the electromagnetic spectrum from radio frequency (RF) communications, LiFi can significantly alleviate the traffic bottlenecks in high density RF scenarios, typically present in an indoor environment. Hence, a combination of LiFi and RF networks becomes a promising candidate for future indoor wireless communications. In a practical indoor scenario, the optical interference from neighbouring LiFi access points (APs) and the blockages of line-of-sight (LoS) optical channels induced by people and objects are the main factors that cause significant optical channel variations. In this study, the effect of these two factors on the system throughput of a hybrid LiFi/RF network is investigated. In order to offer a fair comparison, area data rate, which is defined as the system throughput in a unit area, is used for performance evaluation. The simulation shows that there is an optimal distance between two neighbouring LiFi APs to achieve the highest area data rate. In addition, the area data rate increases with the density of blockages when the blockage density is below a certain threshold.