Deep Learning Framework for Wireless Systems: Applications to Optical Wireless Communications

Optical wireless communication (OWC) is a promising technology for future wireless communications owing to its potentials for cost-effective network deployment and high data rate. There are several implementation issues in the OWC which have not been encountered in radio frequency wireless communications. First, practical OWC transmitters need an illumination control on color, intensity, and luminance, etc., which poses complicated modulation design challenges. Furthermore, signal-dependent properties of optical channels raise non-trivial challenges both in modulation and demodulation of the optical signals. To tackle such difficulties, deep learning (DL) technologies can be applied for optical wireless transceiver design. This article addresses recent efforts on DL-based OWC system designs. A DL framework for emerging image sensor communication is proposed and its feasibility is verified by simulation. Finally, technical challenges and implementation issues for the DL-based optical wireless technology are discussed.Comment: To appear in IEEE Communications Magazine, Special Issue on Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Wireless Communication

Application of Expurgated PPM to Indoor Visible Light Communications - Part I: Single-User Systems

Visible light communications (VLC) in indoor environments suffer from the limited bandwidth of LEDs as well as from the inter-symbol interference (ISI) imposed by multipath. In this work, transmission schemes to improve the performance of indoor optical wireless communication (OWC) systems are introduced. Expurgated pulse-position modulation (EPPM) is proposed for this application since it can provide a wide range of peak to average power ratios (PAPR) needed for dimming of the indoor illumination. A correlation decoder used at the receiver is shown to be optimal for indoor VLC systems, which are shot noise and background-light limited. Interleaving applied on EPPM in order to decrease the ISI effect in dispersive VLC channels can significantly decrease the error probability. The proposed interleaving technique makes EPPM a better modulation option compared to PPM for VLC systems or any other dispersive OWC system. An overlapped EPPM pulse technique is proposed to increase the transmission rate when bandwidth-limited white LEDs are used as sources.Comment: Journal of Lightwave Technolog

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