Time-Sharing-Based Synchronization and Performance Evaluation of Color-Independent Visual-MIMO Communication

Sensors (Basel). 2018 May 14;18(5):1553. doi: 10.3390/s18051553.

Abstract

In the field of communication, synchronization is always an important issue. The communication between a light-emitting diode (LED) array (LEA) and a camera is known as visual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), for which the data transmitter and receiver must be synchronized for seamless communication. In visual-MIMO, LEDs generally have a faster data rate than the camera. Hence, we propose an effective time-sharing-based synchronization technique with its color-independent characteristics providing the key to overcome this synchronization problem in visual-MIMO communication. We also evaluated the performance of our synchronization technique by varying the distance between the LEA and camera. A graphical analysis is also presented to compare the symbol error rate (SER) at different distances.

Keywords: LED array; camera; symbol error rate; synchronization; visual-MIMO.