In this article, a tool for simulating the channel impulse response for indoor visible light communications using 3D computer-aided design (CAD) models is presented. The simulation tool is based on a previous Monte Carlo ray-tracing algorithm for indoor infrared channel estimation, but including wavelength response evaluation. The 3D scene, or the simulation environment, can be defined using any CAD software in which the user specifies, in addition to the setting geometry, the reflection characteristics of the surface materials as well as the structures of the emitters and receivers involved in the simulation. Also, in an effort to improve the computational efficiency, two optimizations are proposed. The first one consists of dividing the setting into cubic regions of equal size, which offers a calculation improvement of approximately 50% compared to not dividing the 3D scene into sub-regions. The second one involves the parallelization of the simulation algorithm, which provides a computational speed-up proportional to the number of processors used.
An adaptive orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system is proposed for multi-user communications over indoor wireless optical channels. The designed system uses multi-user least-squares detection techniques applied to space-division multiple access and OFDM schemes, in conjunction with angle-diversity reception. The system, which does not present an excessive increase in complexity with respect to the previous schemes, can support high bit rates for multiple users, beyond 100 Mbits/s. It also mitigates the channel fluctuations induced when either the space distribution or the number of emitters and receivers varies. The performance of the new proposed scheme is compared with that of a non-adaptive multi-user system and an adaptive single-user system, both described in the previous works, when they face similar environmental situations. The obtained results show a significant enhancement with respect to both the previous multi-user system and the adaptive single-user one, since the new scheme allows adaptively managing the system throughput on a multi-user environment.
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