Impact of Multipath Reflections on the Performance of Indoor Visible Light Positioning Systems

Visible light communication (VLC) using light-emitting-diodes (LEDs) has been a popular research area recently. VLC can provide a practical solution for indoor positioning. In this paper, the impact of multipath reflections on a two-dimensional indoor VLC positioning is investigated, considering a complex indoor environment with walls, floor, and ceiling. For the proposed positioning system, an LED bulb is the transmitter and a photo-diode is the receiver to detect received signal strength information. Combined deterministic and modified Monte Carlo method is applied to compute the impulse response of the optical channel. Since power attenuation is applied to calculate the distance between the transmitter and receiver, the received power from each reflection order is analyzed. The positioning errors are further estimated for all the locations over the room and compared with the previous works where no reflections considered. Finally, calibration approaches are proposed to decrease the effect of multipath reflections.