Diffuse Reflection Effects in Visible Light Positioning: Analysis, Modeling, and Evaluation

Abstract

Currently, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is widely used, but its signal is attenuated by factors such as trees, walls, and ceilings, which severely degrade its positioning accuracy. To fill the gap, various indoor positioning techniques have attracted increasing attention in recent years. Visible light positioning (VLP) is a promising scheme for indoor positioning due to its high precision, high security, and low energy consumption; however, ubiquitous diffuse reflection affects the accuracy and robustness of VLP. During our testing, we found that diffuse reflection could increase the error in RSS values by 20~30%, severely affecting VLP accuracy; however, diffuse reflection is inevitable in real positioning environments. To solve this problem, this paper first establishes a wall diffuse reflection model and then implements a visible light positioning system based on an Internet of Things platform. Finally, this paper uses the system to verify the effectiveness of the diffuse reflection model. The experiments show that the proposed model effectively improves positioning accuracy by 36.7~61.3%.