A Simulation Analysis for LED Spatial Distribution for Indoor Visible Light Communication

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising technology that can jointly be used to accomplish the typical lighting functionalities of the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and data transmission, where light intensity can be modulated on a high rate that cannot be noticed by the human eye. In this paper, a VLC simulation framework to study the effect of LEDs’ distributions on different room dimensions is proposed by considering the performance metrics such as light intensity quality in accordance with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recommendation, and data transmission efficiency measured in terms of bit error rate (BER). To achieve the abovementioned performance metrics, a VLC communication system is designed that modulates the data, transmits it over the room utilizing the communication channel that is modeled using an accurate ray-tracing algorithm, and receives it by exploiting different receivers that are uniformly distributed in the room. Our work is different from the other published works which either studied the data transmission efficiency or lighting quality but not both. Consequently, this study can be used as a methodological foundation to design an efficient VLC that satisfies the ISO lighting requirement, application-specific BER and quality. Furthermore, a video transmission use case has been demonstrated which shows how the video quality can be significantly improved when increasing the number of transmitters, thus justifying the need for increasing the number of transmitters in scenarios that involves video transmission in an indoor VLC environment.