Challenges in optical wireless communication networks
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2020
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Melbourne Authors
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Electrical and Electronic Engineering
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PhD thesis
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Open Access
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© 2020 Sampath Surendra Edirisinghe Edirisinghege
Abstract
Wireless local area networks (WLANs) have continually evolved during the last few decades to meet the ever-growing user demands. However, popular radio frequency technologies such as Wi-Fi are now experiencing a spectrum crunch due to a multitude of bandwidth hungry applications and limited bandwidth available in the sub-6 GHz bands. Therefore, a number of complementary technologies such as 60 GHz Wi-Fi, visible light communication and optical wireless communication have emerged to build high capacity WLANs in indoor spaces.
Amongst these emerging WLAN technologies, optical wireless communication, operating in the infrared range, is becoming popular as it has access to virtually unlimited bandwidth compared to radio frequency technologies. With this huge spectrum resources, it is quite straightforward to establish wireless links over 10 Gbps with optical wireless communication. In addition to that, optical wireless communication has several advantages like not causing interference to existing WLANs, high security, and simple transceiver designs.
Though the physical layer of optical wireless communication is being developed fast and brings unprecedented capabilities to WLAN landscape, upper layer protocols and architectures that are essential in harnessing the benefits of physical layer to provide multi-gigabit communication have received minimal attention so far. Therefore, this thesis explores the upper layer protocols, algorithms and architectures for optical wireless networks in homogeneous and heterogeneous settings.
To this end, we first evaluate the suitability of the contention-based MAC protocol of Wi-Fi standard for optical wireless networks. The inefficiencies of the contention-based MAC protocol are highly pronounced at the higher data rates of optical wireless networks. Therefore, we introduce an improved version of the Wi-Fi MAC protocol with novel dynamic contention window tuning mechanism that can operate at multi-gigabit data rates.
Second, due to the lack of availability of a simulation platform to evaluate the performance of optical wireless communication networks, we develop a simulation module for optical wireless networks in the Network Simulator-3 (ns-3) project. The proposed module can deploy optical wireless networks of different architectures and layouts, apply different scheduling algorithms, and channel models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-gigabit optical wireless network simulation module.
Third, we explored novel network architectures for optical wireless networks considering the massive capacity, increased number of access points and smaller cells. Subsequently, we proposed the FLOWN (full-duplex split-plane optical wireless network) architecture for optical wireless networks. The FLOWN architecture is later generalised to all the upcoming WLANs such as Wi-Fi 6, 60 GHz Wi-Fi, and visible light communication to support homogeneous or heterogeneous WLAN deployments. It features a centralised pool of hardware and software resources, a high-capacity distribution network and advanced capabilities like full-duplex and split-plane operation.
Further, delay-sensitive users can only receive guaranteed quality-of-service under contention-free MAC protocols. Therefore, most of the upcoming WLAN MAC protocols deploy hybrid versions of contention-based and contention-free MAC protocols to reap the advantages of both types. Hence, we finally introduce a contention-free MAC protocol for optical wireless networks with adaptable parameters that can be tuned to the traffic requirements of the current users.
Overall, our work reported in this thesis provide simulation platform for optical wireless networks and also insight into design strategies that can be used to realise centralised multi-gigabit network architectures and MAC protocols.
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Keywords
Optical wireless communication, Infrared wireless communication, Wireless local area networks, Network architecture, Medium access control, ns-3, network simulation