Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Hybrid VLC-RF Networks with Imperfect Channel State Information

The present contribution proposes a general framework for the energy efficiency analysis of a hybrid visible light communication (VLC) and Radio Frequency (RF) wireless system, in which both VLC and RF subsystems utilize nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology. The proposed framework is based on realistic communication scenarios as it takes into account the mobility of users, and assumes imperfect channel-state information (CSI). In this context, tractable closed-form expressions are derived for the corresponding average sum rate of NOMA-VLC and its orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)-VLC counterparts. It is shown extensively that incurred CSI errors have a considerable impact on the average energy efficiency of both NOMA-VLC and OFDMAVLC systems and hence, they should not be neglected in practical designs and deployments. Interestingly, we further demonstrate that the average energy efficiency of the hybrid NOMA-VLCRF system outperforms NOMA-VLC system under imperfect CSI. Respective computer simulations corroborate the derived analytic results and interesting theoretical and practical insights are provided, which will be useful in the effective design and deployment of conventional VLC and hybrid VLC-RF systems

Enabling Low-power Duplex Visible Light Communication

The new generation of LED-based illuminating infrastructures has enabled a "dual-paradigm" where LEDs are used for both illumination and communication purposes. The ubiquity of lighting makes visible light communication (VLC) well suited for communication with mobile devices and sensor nodes in indoor environment. Existing research on VLC has primarily been focused on advancing the performance of one-way communication. In this paper, we present Retro-VLC, a low-power duplex VLC system that enables a mobile device to perform bi-directional communication with the illuminating LEDs over the same light carrier. The design features a retro-reflector fabric that backscatters light, an LCD shutter that modulates information bits on the backscattered light carrier, and several low-power optimization techniques. We have prototyped the Reader system and made a few battery-free tag devices. Experimental results show that the tag can achieve a 10kbps downlink speed and 0.5kbps uplink speed over a distance of 2.4m. We also outline several potential applications of the proposed Retro-VLC system.Comment: Extension of the HotMobile 2015 paper: Retro-VLC: Enabling Battery-free Duplex Visible Light Communication for Mobile and IoT Application

Delay Analysis of Hybrid WiFi-LiFi System

Heterogeneous wireless networks are capable of effectively leveraging different access technologies to provide a wide variety of coverage areas. In this paper, the coexistence of WiFi and visible light communication (VLC) is investigated as a paradigm. The delay of two configurations of such heterogeneous system has been evaluated. In the first configuration, the non-aggregated system, any request is either allocated to WiFi or VLC. While in the second configuration, the aggregated system, each request is split into two pieces, one is forwarded to WiFi and the other is forwarded to VLC. Under the assumptions of Poisson arrival process of requests and the exponential distribution of requests size, it is mathematically proved that the aggregated system provides lower minimum average system delay than that of the non-aggregated system. For the non-aggregated system, the optimal traffic allocation ratio is derived. For the aggregated system, an efficient solution for the splitting ratio is proposed. Empirical results show that the solution proposed here incurs a delay penalty (less than 3\%) over the optimal result

Adaptive Spatial Modulation for Visible Light Communications with an Arbitrary Number of Transmitters

As a power and bandwidth efficient modulation scheme, the optical spatial modulation (SM) technique has recently drawn increased attention in the field of visible light communications (VLC). To guarantee the number of bits mapped by the transmitter's index at each timeslot is an integer, the number of transmitters (i.e., light-emitting diodes) in the SM based VLC system is often set be a power of two. To break the limitation on the required number of transmitters and provide more design flexibility, this paper investigates the SM based VLC with an arbitrary number of transmitters. Initially, a channel adaptive bit mapping (CABM) scheme is proposed, which includes three steps: bit mapping in space domain, bit mapping in signal domain, and the channel adaptive mapping. The proposed CABM scheme allows operation with an arbitrary number of transmitters, and is verified to be an efficient scheme through numerical results. Based on the CABM scheme, the information-theoretical aspects of the SM based VLC are analyzed. The theoretical expression of the mutual information is first analyzed. However, it is very hard to evaluate system performance. To obtain more insights, a lower bound of the mutual information is derived, which is in closedform. Both theoretical analysis and numerical results show that the gap between the mutual information and its lower bound is small. Finally, to further improve the system performance, the precoding scheme is proposed for the SM based VLC. Numerical results show that the system performance improves dramatically when using the proposed precoding scheme.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Access, 201

A Hybrid RF-VLC System for Energy Efficient Wireless Access

In this paper, we propose a new paradigm in designing and realizing energy efficient wireless indoor access networks, namely, a hybrid system enabled by traditional RF access, such as WiFi, as well as the emerging visible light communication (VLC). VLC facilitates the great advantage of being able to jointly perform illumination and communications, and little extra power beyond illumination is required to empower communications, thus rendering wireless access with almost zero power consumption. On the other hand, when illumination is not required from the light source, the energy consumed by VLC could be more than that consumed by the RF. By capitalizing on the above properties, the proposed hybrid RF-VLC system is more energy efficient and more adaptive to the illumination conditions than the individual VLC or RF systems. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed system, we first formulate the problem of minimizing the power consumption of the hybrid RF-VLC system while satisfying the users requests and maintaining acceptable level of illumination, which is NP-complete. Therefore, we divide the problem into two subproblems. In the first subproblems, we determine the set of VLC access points (AP) that needs to be turned on to satisfy the illumination requirements. Given this set, we turn our attention to satisfying the users' requests for real-time communications, and we propose a randomized online algorithm that, against an oblivious adversary, achieves a competitive ratio of $\log(N)\log(M)$ with probability of success $1 - \frac{1}{N}$, where $N$ is the number of users and $M$ is the number of VLC and RF APs. We also show that the best online algorithm to solve this problem can achieve a competitive ratio of $\log(M)$. Simulation results further demonstrate the advantages of the hybrid system

Indoor Location Estimation with Optical-based OFDM Communications

Visible Light Communication (VLC) using light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been gaining increasing attention in recent years as it is appealing for a wide range of applications such as indoor positioning. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been applied to indoor wireless optical communications in order to mitigate the effect of multipath distortion of the optical channel as well as increasing data rate. In this paper, a novel OFDM VLC system is proposed which can be utilized for both communications and indoor positioning. A positioning algorithm based on power attenuation is used to estimate the receiver coordinates. We further calculate the positioning errors in all the locations of a room and compare them with those using single carrier modulation scheme, i.e., on-off keying (OOK) modulation. We demonstrate that OFDM positioning system outperforms its conventional counterpart. Finally, we investigate the impact of different system parameters on the positioning accuracy of the proposed OFDM VLC system.Comment: 10 Pages, Journal paper. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1505.0181

Power Allocation and Link Selection for Multicell Cooperative NOMA Hybrid VLC/RF Systems

This paper proposes and optimizes a cooperative non-orthogonal multiple-access (Co-NOMA) scheme in the context of multicell visible light communications (VLC) networks, as a means to mitigate inter-cell interference in Co-NOMA-enabled systems. Consider a network with multiple VLC access points (APs), where each AP serves two users using light intensity. In each cell, the weak user (the cell edge user) can be served either directly by the VLC AP, or through the strong user that can decode the weak user's message and forward it through the radio-frequency (RF) link. The paper then considers the problem of maximizing the network throughput under quality-of-service (QoS) constraints by allocating the powers of the users' messages and APs' transmit powers, and determining the serving links of each weak user (i.e., VLC or hybrid VLC/RF). The paper solves such a non-convex problem by first finding closed form solutions of the joint users' powers and link selection for a fixed AP power allocation. The APs' transmit powers are then iteratively solved in an outer loop using the golden section method. Simulation results show how the proposed solution and scheme improve the system sum-rate and fairness as compared to conventional non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) schemes

Impact of Multipath Reflections on the Performance of Indoor Visible Light Positioning Systems

Visible light communication (VLC) using light-emitting-diodes (LEDs) has been a popular research area recently. VLC can provide a practical solution for indoor positioning. In this paper, the impact of multipath reflections on indoor VLC positioning is investigated, considering a complex indoor environment with walls, floor and ceiling. For the proposed positioning system, an LED bulb is the transmitter and a photo-diode (PD) is the receiver to detect received signal strength (RSS) information. Combined deterministic and modified Monte Carlo (CDMMC) method is applied to compute the impulse response of the optical channel. Since power attenuation is applied to calculate the distance between the transmitter and receiver, the received power from each reflection order is analyzed. Finally, the positioning errors are estimated for all the locations over the room and compared with the previous works where no reflections considered. Three calibration approaches are proposed to decrease the effect of multipath reflections.Comment: Journal paper, 10 pages, 21 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1504.0119

Optimal and Robust Power Allocation for Visible Light Positioning Systems under Illumination Constraints

The problem of optimal power allocation among light emitting diode (LED) transmitters in a visible light positioning (VLP) system is considered for the purpose of improving localization performance of visible light communication (VLC) receivers. Specifically, the aim is to minimize the Cram\'{e}r-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on the localization error of a VLC receiver by optimizing LED transmission powers in the presence of practical constraints such as individual and total power limitations and illuminance constraints. The formulated optimization problem is shown to be convex and thus can efficiently be solved via standard tools. We also investigate the case of imperfect knowledge of localization parameters and develop robust power allocation algorithms by taking into account both overall system uncertainty and individual parameter uncertainties related to the location and orientation of the VLC receiver. In addition, we address the total power minimization problem under predefined accuracy requirements to obtain the most energy-efficient power allocation vector for a given CRLB level. Numerical results illustrate the improvements in localization performance achieved by employing the proposed optimal and robust power allocation strategies over the conventional uniform and non-robust approaches.Comment: 31 pages, 7 figure

Fully Optical Spacecraft Communications: Implementing an Omnidirectional PV-Cell Receiver and 8Mb/s LED Visible Light Downlink with Deep Learning Error Correction

Free space optical communication techniques have been the subject of numerous investigations in recent years, with multiple missions expected to fly in the near future. Existing methods require high pointing accuracies, drastically driving up overall system cost. Recent developments in LED-based visible light communication (VLC) and past in-orbit experiments have convinced us that the technology has reached a critical level of maturity. On these premises, we propose a new optical communication system utilizing a VLC downlink and a high throughput, omnidirectional photovoltaic cell receiver system. By performing error-correction via deep learning methods and by utilizing phase-delay interference, the system is able to deliver data rates that match those of traditional laser-based solutions. A prototype of the proposed system has been constructed, demonstrating the scheme to be a feasible alternative to laser-based methods. This creates an opportunity for the full scale development of optical communication techniques on small spacecraft as a backup telemetry beacon or as a high throughput link