Handover Modeling for Indoor Li-Fi Cellular Networks: The Effects of Receiver Mobility and Rotation

Light-fidelity (Li-Fi) is an emerging technology for wireless networking based on visible light communication (VLC). As a licence free, high speed, bidirectional and secure wireless access solution, Li-Fi is a complementary building block for fifth generation (5G) heterogeneous mobile networks. By modulating data on the light intensity emitted by light emitting diode (LED) luminaires which already exist in indoor lighting infrastructure, Li-Fi cellular networks are formed. Such networks are termed optical attocell networks, where the optical attcells are smaller in size than the radio frequency (RF) femtocells. This paper focuses on the problem of handover for downlink in an indoor optical attocell network. A fundamental approach is proposed for handover modeling by taking into account the effects of both mobility and rotation for a connected user equipment (UE). By using a random waypoint (RWP) model for the receiver movement and a geometric model for the receiver orientation, the probability of handover and the handover rate are calculated. Novel insights are provided into the handover performance in indoor optical attocell networks using Monte Carlo simulations.