Energy adaptive MAC protocol for IEEE 802.15.7 with energy harvesting

Abstract:

The medium access control (MAC) protocol for indoor visible light communication (VLC) with energy harvesting is explored in this paper. The unfairness of throughput exists among devices due to the significant difference of their energy harvesting rates which changes with distance, acceptance angle and the obstruction probability. We propose an energy harvesting model, a new obstruction probability model and an energy adaptive contention algorithm to overcome the unfairness problem. This device can adjust its contention window according to the energy harvesting rate. As a result, the device with lower energy harvesting rate can get shorter contention window to improve its transmission opportunity. Simulation results show that our MAC protocol can achieve a higher degree of fairness.