Indoor positioning with OFDM Visible Light Communications

Abstract

Visible Light Communication (VLC) technology using light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been gaining increasing attention in recent years as it is appealing for a wide range of applications such as indoor positioning. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been applied to indoor wireless optical communications in order to mitigate the effect of multipath distortion of the optical channel as well as increasing data rate. In this paper, we investigate the indoor positioning accuracy of optical based OFDM techniques used in VLC systems. A positioning algorithm based on power attenuation is used to estimate the receiver coordinates. We further calculate the positioning errors in all the locations of a room and compare them with those using single carrier modulation scheme, i.e., on-off keying (OOK) modulation. We demonstrate that OFDM positioning system outperforms its conventional counterpart.