Vertical Handover Scheme for Enhancing the QoE in VLC Heterogeneous Networks

Visible light communication (VLC) is becoming a potential complementary method to its radio frequency (RF) counterpart. A tier-two VLC-RF system offers the solution to the future communications system that puts together VLC to support big data rate, enormous bandwidth and RF to support dependable mobile connectivity. In order to improve the performance of such a heterogeneous system, vertical handover (VHO) is critical. In this article, we present a VHO scheme based on Markov decision process (MDP) that maximizes the quality of experience (QoE) of a user equipment (UE). When UE makes a handover between VLC and the RF network, the influence on the UE’s QoE may be positive or negative. The handover decision is made in order to enhance the benefit on QoE and reduce the cost of handover of the user. From the simulation results, our proposed VHO method attains a higher QoE and has the least handover delay cost when compared with benchmark schemes.