Shadow Effect of Human Obstacles on Indoor Visible Light Communication System with Multiple Light Sources

Abstract

When the direct visible-light channel is affected by people walking or other obstacles, the shadow effect formed in the receiver space affects communication performance and can even lead to communication interruption. In this paper, two numerical methods for calculating the shadow area of the human body were proposed for an indoor multi-light communication system. The influence of shadows on system performance was analyzed using the mean square errors of illuminance and signal-to-noise ratio, as well as the interrupt probability, as parameters. The results showed that shadows had a great influence on the performance of the visible-light communication system. When the number of light sources was fixed, the shadow effect could be effectively reduced by optimizing the layout of the light sources. These research results can provide a theoretical basis for improving the stability of visible-light communication systems.