Design and Implementation of Mobility Management for Indoor Beam-Steered Infrared Light Communication System

This work describes a beam-steered infrared light communication (BS-ILC) system that facilitates non-shared and ultra-high data rate communications to individual user devices. The BS-ILC system comprises optical antennas, vision-based user localization, and optical receivers (each having a wide field-of-view photodetector and an IR-LED tag). Because of deploying narrow optical beams, the BS-ILC system requires efficient mobility management to support mobile user devices. This study develops a new BS-ILC model based on the Gaussian beam propagation that precisely estimates the user device’s received signal strength from its localized position. Then, we propose mobility management consisting of two main components as location management and handover management. We further analyze the handover rate and the ping-pong effect to design the most efficient and robust handover mechanisms. Numerical and experimental results illustrate that the proposed mobility management can realize the seamless transmission, enabling >10 Gbit/s link per user.