Implementation and Evaluation of Novel Architecture Using Optical Wireless for WLAN Control Plane

We propose a novel wireless control system architecture that divides the wireless service area into smaller optical cells and centrally controls the user equipment (UE) connections under each optical cell. The proposal transmits via IoT smart lighting an optical identifier (ID) specifying connection information to the UE with illuminance sensor. The received optical ID indicates the optimum connection destination. Two solutions are proposed to overcome the hardware restrictions faced by optical ID transmission/reception. Oversampled edge-excluded receiving scheme (OE) reduces the error rate; the signal is oversampled and each window subjected to majority decision. Optical ID reception with lower error rate than conventional approach is realized with a minimum received illuminance of just 8.5 lx (background illuminance 226.67 lx) and a modulation factor of 7 %. Fast optical ID authentication (FA) reduces the authentication cycle preceding optical ID reception by performing correlation calculation between the cyclic matrix and an optical ID list. FA shortens the authentication cycle by 62.5 % (1200 ms to 450 ms). Furthermore, an optical cell control algorithm (ScanLine-based/MinDist-based) is proposed to offset the deterioration in network quality created by non-uniform UE distribution. ScanLine-based algorithm controls optical cells in scanning line manner, while MinDist-based favors optical cells with the minimum distance from the access point (AP). It is confirmed that with an optical cell radius of 5 m or less, the capacity difference per user is reduced compared to the existing RSSI-based alternative while reducing the deterioration of total capacity in extremely biased user distribution scenarios.