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

Performance analysis of MIMO techniques for a pyramid receiver in an indoor MIMO-VLC system

In an indoor multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) visible light communication (VLC) system, line of sight (LoS) channel links are present between a light-emitting diode (LED) based transmitter and a photodetector (PD) based receiver. The PDs in the receiver are closely packed resulting in a high channel correlation. To overcome channel correlation and improve the performance of the MIMO-VLC system, angle diversity receivers (ADRs) are commonly employed. The channel matrix entries depend on the normal vectors of the PDs, which in turn depend on the elevation angle (EA) of the PDs. Thus, by having normal vectors pointing in different directions, the channel correlation can be considerably reduced. This paper considers a special type of ADR called pyramid receiver (PR) and employs a 4x4 MIMO-VLC system. In this paper, different MIMO algorithms such as repetition coding (RC) and spatial multiplexing (SMP) are considered to exhibit and compare the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the fixed and variable EA MIMO-VLC systems. The results show that an SMP-employed MIMO-VLC system outperforms the RC-employed MIMO-VLC system. SMP results in an spatial multiplexing gain that varies linearly with the number of LEDs whereas RC does not yield any spatial multiplexing gain. To attain the same spectral efficiency i.e. 4 bit/s/Hz, a larger signal constellation size is required for RC employed MIMO-VLC system to achieve the same BER as of an SMP employed MIMO-VLC system. Similarly, the BER performance of variable EA MIMO-VLC systems is better as compared to fixed EA MIMO-VLC systems

Design guidelines for spatial modulation

A new class of low-complexity, yet energyefficient Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) transmission techniques, namely the family of Spatial Modulation (SM) aided MIMOs (SM-MIMO) has emerged. These systems are capable of exploiting the spatial dimensions (i.e. the antenna indices) as an additional dimension invoked for transmitting information, apart from the traditional Amplitude and Phase Modulation (APM). SM is capable of efficiently operating in diverse MIMO configurations in the context of future communication systems. It constitutes a promising transmission candidate for large-scale MIMO design and for the indoor optical wireless communication whilst relying on a single-Radio Frequency (RF) chain. Moreover, SM may also be viewed as an entirely new hybrid modulation scheme, which is still in its infancy. This paper aims for providing a general survey of the SM design framework as well as of its intrinsic limits. In particular, we focus our attention on the associated transceiver design, on spatial constellation optimization, on link adaptation techniques, on distributed/ cooperative protocol design issues, and on their meritorious variants