Performance analysis of full-duplex visible light communication networks

Full-duplex transmission can be easily implemented on a visible light communication (VLC) link. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a VLC network with full-duplex optical links. We propose two contention protocols, named U-ALOHA and FD-CSMA, to utilize the full-duplex capability effectively. Their performances in terms of channel utilization and network throughput are analyzed and simulated and compared with a protocol with half-duplex links. The results show that the proposed protocols can effectively exploit the full-duplex capability. U-ALOHA achieves high channel utilization on the downlink channel while FD-CSMA has good performance on both downlink and uplink channels. Both of them outperform the protocol with half-duplex links when the traffic load is sufficiently high.