Coordinated Broadcasting for Multiuser Indoor Visible Light Communication Systems

With the recent successful standardization of broadband power line communication (PLC) (IEEE 1901, ITU-T G.9960/61) and visible light communication (VLC) (IEEE 802.15.7), there is an excellent opportunity to consider their integration. In particular, there is inherent benefit to leveraging existing power line infrastructure to provide connectivity while exploiting energy-efficient LED illumination systems for wireless downlink. The ubiquity of LED lighting together with power line networks leads us to conclude that VLC will be a strong complementary wireless technology to indoor PLC much in the way that Wi-Fi currently supports broadband Ethernet connections. This paper will survey some aspects of both PLC and VLC and present new proposals for their integration.

Modern hospitals are beginning to adopt E-HEALTH as efficient complements to the traditional healthcare services. To support the E-HEALTH services, a locatable, radiation-free and high-capacity communication system is urgently needed in hospitals. Power line communication (PLC) system can use the ubiquitous power line network to power the light-emitting diode (LED) lights while serving as the backbone network for the indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems naturally. In this paper, an integrated broadband power line and visible light communication systems with OFDM modulation is proposed for the indoor hospital applications. This gives a brand-new solution to replace the conventional wireless communication systems in hospitals.

For channel estimation in the relay-assisted multiple-input multiple-output and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing indoor visible light communication (VLC) system affected by light source, there is a problem that the received signal cannot be separated by simple filtering. To solve this problem, a channel estimation by PARATUCK2-PARAFAC-based noise compensation which introduces tensors to construct the suitable model of VLC is proposed. First, the transmitting pilots for channel estimation and noise estimation are constructed separately with the Hermitian symmetry structure. Then the tensor-based transmission model of the indoor VLC system is established, and the signals for channel and noise estimations are received. Finally, an asymptotic estimation for separating signals from different sources and noise is proposed by PARATUCK2-PARAFAC. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides a more effective scheme for channel estimation comparing with the state-of-the-art algorithms.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel integrated passive optical network (PON) and indoor visible light communication (VLC) system based on Nyquist single carrier frequency domain equalization (N-SC-FDE) modulation with direct detection. In this system, a directly modulated laser and a commercially available red light emitting diode are served as the transmitters of the PON and VLC, respectively. To enable high spectral efficiency, high-speed transmission, and flexible multiple access with simplified optical network unit-side digital signal processing, multilevel, multiband quadrature amplitude modulations 128/64/16 are implemented here. VLC N-SC-FDE signals are successfully delivered a further 30 cm indoor distance after transmitting over a span of 40 km single mode fiber (SMF) together with 3 sub-band PON signals. As a proof of concept, a 10 Gb/s PON and 500 Mb/s VLC integrated system for three wired users and one wireless user is successfully achieved, which shows the promising potential and feasibility of this proposal to extend multiple services from metropolitan to suburban areas.

In this paper, we propose, design, and evaluate two indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems based on computer generated holograms (CGHs); a simple static CGH-VLC system and an adaptive CGH-VLC system. Each transmitter is followed by the CGH, and this CGH is utilized to direct part of the total power from the best transmitter and focus it to a specific area on the communication floor. This leads to reduction in inter-symbol interference and increasing in the received optical power, which leads to higher data rates with a reliable connection. In the static CG11H-VLC system, the CGH generates 100 beams (all these beams carry same data) from the best transmitter and directs these beams to an area of 2 m $\times2$ m on the communication floor. In the adaptive CGH-VLC system, the CGH is used to generate eight beams from the best transmitter and steer these beams to the receiver’s location. In addition, each one of these eight beams carries a different data stream. Whereas in the first system, a single photodetector is used (added simplicity), an imaging receiver is used in the second one to obtain spatial multiplexing. We consider the lighting constraints where illumination should be at acceptable level and consider diffusing reflections (up to second order) to find the maximum data rate that can be offered by each system. Moreover, due to the fact that each beam in the adaptive CGH-VLC system conveys a different data stream, co-channel interference between beams is taken into account. We evaluate our proposed systems in two different indoor environments: an empty room and a realistic room using simple on–off-keying modulation. The results show that the static CGH-VLC system offers a data rate of 8 Gb/s while the adaptive CGH-VLC system can achieve a data rate of 40 Gb/s.

This paper presents the first active matrix LED (AMLED) microdisplay driver with built-in visible light communication (VLC) transmitter. The wide quarter-VGA (WQVGA) display features 400×240 pixels of 30×30 μm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> micro-LEDs (μLED) on a single GaN IC flip-chip bonded to the proposed driver SoC. Pulse-width modulation (PWM) superimposed with on-off keying (OOK) modulation are employed for controlling the display grayscale and modulating the pixels with VLC data simultaneously. Implemented in 0.5-μm CMOS, the SoC enables a microdisplay module featuring 4-bit grayscale at 100-Hz frame rate while achieving 1.25-Mb/s lensless VLC up to 25 cm.

Optimizing SNR for indoor visible light communication via selecting communicating LEDs

A location-adaptive transmission scheme for indoor visible light communication (VLC) system is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, the symbol error rate (SER) of less than 10-3 should be guaranteed. And the scheme is realized by the variable multilevel pulse-position modulation (MPPM), where the transmitters adaptively adjust the number of time slots n in the MPPM symbol according to the position of the receiver. The purpose of our scheme is to achieve the best data rate in the indoor different locations. The results show that the location-adaptive transmission scheme based on the variable MPPM is superior in the indoor VLC system.

In this paper, an indoor visible light communication (VLC) system is considered. The system consists of multiple VLC access points that assist in providing high data rate downlink to multiple users. We propose Nth best node selection algorithm for indoor VLC system. The Nth best node selection analysis hold significance at times when the best node is not available; hence, the user has to switch to second or third best generally the Nth best. We derive exact closed form expressions for outage probability, coverage probability, average symbol bit error rate and ergodic capacity.

이 논문에서는 LED(Light Emitting Diode) 조명을 이용한 간편한 가시광 통신 시스템을 구현하기 위해, 비 캐리어 NRZ-OOK(non-return to zero on off keying) 변조 방식을 사용하고, 가시광 송신을 위한 발광소자인 <TEX>$3{\times}3$</TEX> 백색 LED 배열과 가시광 수신을 위한 여러 가지 포토다이오드를 사용하여 송수신 소자사이의 거리가 약 2.5m이고, 전체 시스템 속도가 115.2kbps의 전송속도를 가지는 가시광 시스템을 설계하여 구현 한다. 구현된 시스템의 성능분석을 위해 LED 와 포토다이오드 종류, LED 배열 수, 전송속도 따른 최대 송수신 거리를 구하고 여러 가지 구현시스템의 성능을 실험을 통해 분석한다. In this paper, as a study of the simple visible light communication(VLC) with LED light, the visible light communication system that are made up with the <TEX>$3{\times}3$</TEX> white LED array for visible light transmission, various photodiodes for visible light reception, and a non-carrier NRZ-OOK modulation scheme is designed and implemented to have a 115.2 kbps data speed at 2.5 m distance between transmitter and receiver. For the performance analysis of the developed VLC system, the maximum distance between VLC transmitter and receiver on the conditions of various transmission speeds, the number of LED array, or the various kind of LED and photodiode is obtained, and various performances are analyzed by experiments.

Visible light communication (VLC) using white-light emitting diode (LED) is gaining increasing attention and considered as an alternative to overcome drawbacks of radio frequency (RF) communication technology. In order to deal with mobility in indoor VLC systems, sufficient overlap areas of adjacent LEDs are required for successful handover. In this paper, we propose a configuration method of LEDs for supporting handover in VLC systems by placing the LEDs in the way so that the overlap areas of adjacent LEDs to be large enough for successful handover while maximizing illumination and communication performance. To analyze communication performance, received power and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are taken into account. It is assumed that each LED is modulated at an identical frequency in order to mitigate the affect of intersymbol interference (ISI) then remove the trade-off between SNR and received power. Simulation results show that by applying the configuration method, we can design an LED layout setting that supports successful handover and gives high communication performance corresponding to each room dimension and user condition.

This paper investigates the effect of light emitting diodes (LEDs) positioning and allocation in the channel analysis performance for an indoor intra-vehicle visible light communication (VLC) system. The MATLAB simulation results focus on the received power and the signal to noise ratio (SNR) within a sports utility vehicle. Furthermore, this work aims to validate by investigating two different scenarios, one utilizing two sources of power and the other using three sources of power with various locations, how LED’s spatial positioning affects the VLC system and the probability of error. Proving the demand for considering LEDs layout positioning while designing a VLC system.

Visible light positioning (VLP) is an emerging positioning technique that utilizes indoor light sources to broadcast archer locations through visible light communication (VLC). Benefited by the densely deployed light lamps, VLP holds the promise for more accurate positioning accuracy than RF based approaches, and thus enables interesting applications such as retail navigation and shelf-level advertising in supermarkets and shopping malls. However, we observe that in existing VLP systems, receiving devices are heavily burdened in handling light flickering for VLC. In order to prevent human from being disturbed, the VLC transmitter lamps have to transmit pulses in a high rate (over 1kHz). Since the pulse rate far exceeds the cameras' sampling capability (30fps), receiver design either requires customized light sensor with cumbersome calibration on receiving signal strength [2] or processing high resolution images to leverage rolling shutter effect of the CMOS camera to decode message [1]. The heavy burden on receiving devices motivated us to try getting rid of light flickers. Since human eyes normally can not perceive changes in polarization, the idea is to modulate polarization instead of intensity for communication. In this demo, we demonstrate the VLC system in our VLP design [3] which realizes this idea. It enables lightweight VLC that is even affordable in wearables (Google Glass), without incurring hardware modification or computation off-loading. Moreover, it also makes other types of illuminating light beyond LED light (even sun light) possible to construct communication, therefore eliminates the barrier for deploying future VLC-based applications. As detailed in the full paper [3], our design was inspired by the liquid crystal display (LCD), from which we borrowed polarizer and liquid crystal. Liquid crystal has the property to change the polarization of bypassing polarized light according to the applied voltage. We use polarizer to polarize illuminating light and leverage liquid crystal to modulate bits through changing the light's polarization. The receiver can thus detect changes in polarization with a polarizing film, through which different polarizations result in different intensities. Since the SNR of such communication channel may significantly vary with the mobility of receiving device, we propose to add a dispersion filter to the transmitter. The dispersion filter can cast different frequency of lights into different polarization directions so that SNR in different receiving directions are evened. With the above techniques, VLC transmitter generates signal in low baud rate and mobile devices can perform VLC through camera directly. The communication is long in distance and lightweight enough for resource-constrained devices since the information is carried in intensity changes rather than certain image patterns in rolling shutter approaches. In this demo, we will illustrate the prototype implementation of the VLC communication system. We use incandescent lamps as illuminating light sources. The transmitter consists of a polarizing film, a liquid crystal layer, a dispersor and a control board. The receiver is demonstrated in Android smartphone with polarizing film in front of the camera.

Driven by the increase in Internet of Things (IoT) devices for smart home technologies, visible light communications (VLC) using multiple light emitting diodes (LEDs) have been attracting much attention in order to cope with depleted radio frequency spectrum. This paper presents a suboptimal LED selection algorithm for distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO) VLC systems. When total ceiling LEDs are turned on to send information while illuminating an indoor environment, the problems of low energy efficiency and mutual interference between VLC channels arise. The proposed algorithm begins by selecting the LED associated with the largest VLC channel gain and adds the LED supporting the largest level of uncorrelation with the maximum VLC channel gain in each step. Simulation results showed that the proposed scheme achieves a capacity similar to an optimal selection algorithm with reduced computational complexity. With a larger distance between the light terminals and a shorter distance between the LEDs, better channel capacity performance of the proposed scheme can be achieved.

A low complexity power allocation scheme for NOMA-based indoor VLC systems