Li-Pos: A Light Positioning Framework Leveraging OFDM for Visible Light Communication

Sensors (Basel). 2021 Jun 24;21(13):4310. doi: 10.3390/s21134310.

Abstract

The design of solid-state lighting is vital, as numerous metrics are involved in their exact positioning, and as it is utilized in various processes, ranging from intelligent buildings to the internet of things (IoT). This work aims to determine the power and delay spread from the light source to the receiver plane. The positions of the light source and receiver were used for power estimation. We focus on analog orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in visible light communication (VLC) and assess the area under the curve (AUC). The proposed system was designed using modulation techniques (i.e., quadrature amplitude modulation; QAM) for visible light communication (VLC) and pulse-width modulation (PWM) for dimming sources. For the positioning and spreading of brightness, the proof-of-concept was weighted equally over the entire area. Therefore, the receiver plane was analyzed, in order to measure the power of each light-emitting diode (LED) in a given area, using the delayed mean square error (MSE). A framework was applied for the placement of LEDs, using full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) parameters with varying distances. Then, the received power was confirmed. The results show that the AUC using DRMS values for LEDs significantly increased (by 30%) when the number of source LEDs was changed from four to three. These results confirm that our system, associated with the simple linear lateration estimator, can achieve better energy consumption.

Keywords: full-width half maximum; optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing; positioning; power and delay spread; visible light communication.