Experimental Comparison of ALOHA and CSMA/CA for Visible Light Communication IoT Networks

Abstract

This paper compares the performance of carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) and pure ALOHA for visible light communication (VLC) Internet of Things (IoT) networks using experimental investigation. For the physical layer, we use the VLCIoT system. VLCIoT is a VLC hardware system that was designed and implemented in our previous work. For comparison, goodput, frame size, network load, and average delay are considered. The results show the advantage of CSMA/CA over pure ALOHA is when each node receives data from other nodes. Indeed, in VLC networks, due to the directionality of light, the effectiveness of carrier sensing in the CSMA/CA is sensitive to network setup. Furthermore, in low network load, which is common in IoT networks, the performance of CSMA/CA and pure ALOHA is not different significantly.