An Adaptive Handover Scheme for Hybrid LiFi and WiFi Networks

The hybrid light fidelity (LiFi) and wireless fidelity (WiFi) network (HLWNet) is considered to be a potential component of the next generation indoor wireless networks. However, due to the susceptible line-of-sight propagation of optical signal and the ultra-dense deployment of LiFi access points, the handover problem in the HLWNet becomes challenging and it is hard to design a handover scheme that adapts to complex indoor working scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel handover scheme, in which the handover events in HLWNet are classified into three categories and a particular strategy for each category is applied to calculate the optimal dwell time in the handover procedure. The proposed handover scheme is adaptive to different working situations, since the information about multiple attributes, such as channel quality, user velocity, and arrivals data rate, is gathered to make the handover decision and to calculate the dwell value. The simulation results show that, compared to the benchmarks, the proposed method is able to increase the user throughput by around 65%, decrease the handover rate by up to 80%, and reduce the packet delay by up to 57%. In addition, the proposed method significantly improves the robustness performance of user throughput and handover rate under different scenarios.