Impact of Wall Coating on the Behavior of Indoor OWC under Diffuse Topology

Abstract

Optical wireless communication (OWC) is an innovative technology that is gaining more attention as the demand for capacity continues to increase. It is one of the most promising alternative technologies for indoor and outdoor applications. In this paper, the effect of the inner wall coating material, color and roughness on the performance of OWC system implementing single-diffuse topology is studied. A new procedure is proposed to generate a rough surface model with predetermined statistical properties to simulate the matte painting material on the internal walls of a room. Additionally, a new technique that applies the geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD) in conjunction with a ray tracing (RT) scenario is developed to evaluate the scattered optical beam due to a primary ray incident on a Lambertian surface. The performance of the single-diffuse OWC strategy is assessed by investigating some important performance measurements such as signal strength and the bit error rate (BER) due to unavoidable ambient light which is modeled as an additive white Gaussian noise. It is shown that the surface roughness of the matte painting on the Lambertian diffuse surface has a major effect on the indoor OWC system performance.