Indoor Visible Light Communication:A Tutorial and Survey

Abstract With the advancement of solid-state devices for lighting, illumination is on the verge of being completely restructured. This revolution comes with numerous advantages and viable opportunities that can transform the world of wireless communications for the better. Solid-state LEDs are rapidly replacing the contemporary incandescent and fluorescent lamps. In addition to their high energy efficiency, LEDs are desirable for their low heat generation, long lifespan, and their capability to switch on and off at an extremely high rate. The ability of switching between different levels of luminous intensity at such a rate has enabled the inception of a new communication technology referred to as visible light communication (VLC). With this technology, the LED lamps are additionally being used for data transmission. This paper provides a tutorial and a survey of VLC in terms of the design, development, and evaluation techniques as well as current challenges and their envisioned solutions. The focus of this paper is mainly directed towards an indoor setup. An overview of VLC, theory of illumination, system receivers, system architecture, and ongoing developments are provided. We further provide some baseline simulation results to give a technical background on the performance of VLC systems. Moreover, we provide the potential of incorporating VLC techniques in the current and upcoming technologies such as fifth-generation (5G), beyond fifth-generation (B5G) wireless communication trends including sixth-generation (6G), and intelligent reflective surfaces (IRSs) among others

Visible Light Communication (VLC)

Visible light communication (VLC) using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or laser diodes (LDs) has been envisioned as one of the key enabling technologies for 6G and Internet of Things (IoT) systems, owing to its appealing advantages, including abundant and unregulated spectrum resources, no electromagnetic interference (EMI) radiation and high security. However, despite its many advantages, VLC faces several technical challenges, such as the limited bandwidth and severe nonlinearity of opto-electronic devices, link blockage and user mobility. Therefore, significant efforts are needed from the global VLC community to develop VLC technology further. This Special Issue, “Visible Light Communication (VLC)”, provides an opportunity for global researchers to share their new ideas and cutting-edge techniques to address the above-mentioned challenges. The 16 papers published in this Special Issue represent the fascinating progress of VLC in various contexts, including general indoor and underwater scenarios, and the emerging application of machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) techniques in VLC

A two phase framework for visible light-based positioning in an indoor environment: performance, latency, and illumination

Recently with the advancement of solid state lighting and the application thereof to Visible Light Communications (VLC), the concept of Visible Light Positioning (VLP) has been targeted as a very attractive indoor positioning system (IPS) due to its ubiquity, directionality, spatial reuse, and relatively high modulation bandwidth. IPSs, in general, have 4 major components (1) a modulation, (2) a multiple access scheme, (3) a channel measurement, and (4) a positioning algorithm. A number of VLP approaches have been proposed in the literature and primarily focus on a fixed combination of these elements and moreover evaluate the quality of the contribution often by accuracy or precision alone. In this dissertation, we provide a novel two-phase indoor positioning algorithmic framework that is able to increase robustness when subject to insufficient anchor luminaries and also incorporate any combination of the four major IPS components. The first phase provides robust and timely albeit less accurate positioning proximity estimates without requiring more than a single luminary anchor using time division access to On Off Keying (OOK) modulated signals while the second phase provides a more accurate, conventional, positioning estimate approach using a novel geometric constrained triangulation algorithm based on angle of arrival (AoA) measurements. However, this approach is still an application of a specific combination of IPS components. To achieve a broader impact, the framework is employed on a collection of IPS component combinations ranging from (1) pulsed modulations to multicarrier modulations, (2) time, frequency, and code division multiple access, (3) received signal strength (RSS), time of flight (ToF), and AoA, as well as (4) trilateration and triangulation positioning algorithms. Results illustrate full room positioning coverage ranging with median accuracies ranging from 3.09 cm to 12.07 cm at 50% duty cycle illumination levels. The framework further allows for duty cycle variation to include dimming modulations and results range from 3.62 cm to 13.15 cm at 20% duty cycle while 2.06 cm to 8.44 cm at a 78% duty cycle. Testbed results reinforce this frameworks applicability. Lastly, a novel latency constrained optimization algorithm can be overlaid on the two phase framework to decide when to simply use the coarse estimate or when to expend more computational resources on a potentially more accurate fine estimate. The creation of the two phase framework enables robust, illumination, latency sensitive positioning with the ability to be applied within a vast array of system deployment constraints

Simulation, performance and interference analysis of multi-user visible light communication systems

The emergence of new physical media such as optical wireless, and the ability to aggregate these new media with legacy networks motivate the study of heterogeneous network performance, especially with respect to the design of protocols to best exploit the characteristics of each medium. This study considers Visible Light Communications (VLC), which is expected to coexist with legacy and future radio frequency (RF) media. While most of the research on VLC has been done on optimizing the physical medium, research on higher network layers is only beginning to gain attention, requiring new analyses and tools for performance analysis. The first part of the dissertation concerns with developing a new ns3-based VLC module that can be used to study VLC-RF heterogeneous networks via simulation. The proposed ns3 module is developed based on existing models for intensity modulated LED signals operating as lighting units transmitting to optical receivers at indoor scales (meters). These models and the corresponding simulation model are validated using a testbed implemented with a software-defined radio (SDR) system, photodetector, phosphor-converted “white” LEDs, and under PSK and QAM modulation. Two scenarios are used in the validation of the VLC module: (i) using a receiver placed right bellow the transmitter with varying range, and (ii) using a receiver with a fixed range and varying angle of acceptance. Results indicate good correspondence between the simulated and actual testbed performance. Subsequently, it demonstrates how the VLC module can be used to predict the performance of a hybrid WiFi/VLC network simulated using the ns3 environment with UDP, TCP, and combined network traffic. The second part of the dissertation focuses on modeling interference at VLC system level based on variable pulse position modulation (VPPM) and variable on-off keying (VOOK) which are used in VLC to simultaneously provide lighting with dimming control as well as communication. The bit error performance of these modulation schemes is evaluated at VLC systems consisting of multiple transmitters-receivers pairs, where co-channels interference exists. The BER is derived by providing an in depth analysis that captures the signal structure of the interference in terms of the number of transmitters. This work dispenses with the Gaussian interference model which is not suitable when the number of interferers are few and the central limit theorem (CLT) cannot be applied. The result shows that under realistic small-room scenario, the analytical results closely match with that of simulation

A Survey of Positioning Systems Using Visible LED Lights

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.As Global Positioning System (GPS) cannot provide satisfying performance in indoor environments, indoor positioning technology, which utilizes indoor wireless signals instead of GPS signals, has grown rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, visible light communication (VLC) using light devices such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been deemed to be a promising candidate in the heterogeneous wireless networks that may collaborate with radio frequencies (RF) wireless networks. In particular, light-fidelity has a great potential for deployment in future indoor environments because of its high throughput and security advantages. This paper provides a comprehensive study of a novel positioning technology based on visible white LED lights, which has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. The essential characteristics and principles of this system are deeply discussed, and relevant positioning algorithms and designs are classified and elaborated. This paper undertakes a thorough investigation into current LED-based indoor positioning systems and compares their performance through many aspects, such as test environment, accuracy, and cost. It presents indoor hybrid positioning systems among VLC and other systems (e.g., inertial sensors and RF systems). We also review and classify outdoor VLC positioning applications for the first time. Finally, this paper surveys major advances as well as open issues, challenges, and future research directions in VLC positioning systems.Peer reviewe

A novel OFDM format and a machine learning based dimming control for lifi

This paper proposes a new hybrid orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) form termed as DC‐biased pulse amplitude modulated optical OFDM (DPO‐OFDM) by combining the ideas of the existing DC‐biased optical OFDM (DCO‐OFDM) and pulse amplitude modulated discrete multitone (PAM‐DMT). The analysis indicates that the required DC‐bias for DPO‐OFDM-based light fidelity (LiFi) depends on the dimming level and the components of the DPO‐OFDM. The bit error rate (BER) performance and dimming flexibility of the DPO‐OFDM and existing OFDM schemes are evaluated using MATLAB tools. The results show that the proposed DPO‐OFDM is power efficient and has a wide dimming range. Furthermore, a switching algorithm is introduced for LiFi, where the individual components of the hybrid OFDM are switched according to a target dimming level. Next, machine learning algorithms are used for the first time to find the appropriate proportions of the hybrid OFDM components. It is shown that polynomial regression of degree 4 can reliably predict the constellation size of the DCO‐OFDM component of DPO‐OFDM for a given constellation size of PAM‐DMT. With the component switching and the machine learning algorithms, DPO‐OFDM‐based LiFi is power efficient at a wide dimming range. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Joint Dimming Control and Optimal Power Allocation for THO-OFDM Visible Light Communications

Layered or hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been proposed for use in optical communications due to its excellent spectral and power efficiencies, especially in visible light communications (VLC). However, most of the current works concentrate on transmitter and receiver design as well as the quality of service in communication networks. In this paper, we propose a spectrum-efficient dimmable triple-layer hybrid optical OFDM (DTH-OFDM) scheme to tackle the illumination requirements, considering different practical indoor VLC scenarios from low illumination to high illumination intensities. In the proposed DTH-OFDM scheme, the required dimming level is achieved by jointly adjusting the dimming factors and direct current bias. We investigate the comprehensive performance analysis of the proposed DTH-OFDM in detail, including probability density function, bit error rate (BER), spectral and energy efficiencies. In addition, a joint dimming control and optimal power allocation problem for DTH-OFDM is formulated and solved using convex optimization under the constraints of light emitting diode (LED) nonlinearity, dimming target and communications reliability. Numerical results show that, the proposed DTH-OFDM can offer continuous and arbitrary dimming target with higher spectral efficiency and lower BER compared with its counterparts, as well as an enhanced tolerance to the LED nonlinearity