Design and Demonstration of a TDD-Based Central-Coordinated Resource-Reserved Multiple Access (CRMA) Scheme for Bidirectional VLC Networking

The sharply growing demand for increased transmission capacity and bandwidth in last meter and last mile access networks together with the commercialization of fifth generation (5G) wireless systems has been opening up new opportunities for non-radio frequency (RF)-based wireless technologies. Visible light communications (VLC) technology is a potential candidate for access networking in 5G, which offers a higher spectral efficiency than RF-based Femtocell networks by three orders of magnitude. This paper proposes an all wireless optical bidirectional VLC multiple access scheme for pure VLC network access points in terminals. Centralized coordination is adopted to reduce the system complexity. And reservation of resource is introduced to guarantee collision avoidance during data frame transmission. The proposed multiple access scheme introduces special system parameters to achieve the balance of system throughput and access latency. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is verified by both theoretical analysis and experimental investigation. We show that the proposed scheme is suitable for a bidirectional pure VLC access network and can be used as a supplement in the IEEE 802.11 bb for 5G+bidirectional VLC application scenarios.