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

Abstract

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