MAC Layer Design for Network-Enabled Visible Light Communication Systems Compliant with IEEE 802.15.7

Abstract

The design and implementation of medium access control (MAC) layer for network-enabled visible light communication (VLC) system is presented in this paper. The point-to-point link was chosen because of its simple in configuration as well as implementation. Whereas the FPGA Zybo Zynq-7000 is employed for prototyping the hardware of VLC system because of it serve a Linux operating system (OS), i.e. Xillinux. Our MAC layer has been realized in Python programming and running above the Zynq-7000 processor. The designed MAC Layer is adapted from IEEE 802.15.7 standard, specifically for delivering and receiving the MAC frames from the coordinator to the device or vice versa, wrapping the IP packets and unwrapping the MAC Frames with MAC headers and trailers, and performing the error detection in which the cyclic redundant check 16 (CRC-16) was selected. According to the functionality test, our proposed VLC system can perform to send the multimedia contents (video and image) as well as data packet for internet accessing purpose like a wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) connectivity. Thus, it can be concluded that the implemented MAC layer has met the functionality specifications referred to the IEEE 802.15.7 standard. We also provide the Pseudo-code of designed MAC layer and its Python script (source-code) implementation that can be found in the Appendix section.