Indoor location estimation with optical-based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing communications

Visible light communication (VLC) using light-emitting diodes 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 the data rate. An OFDM VLC system is proposed, which can be utilized for both communications and indoor positioning. 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 schemes, i.e., on-off keying modulation. We demonstrate that our proposed OFDM positioning system outperforms by 74% its conventional counterpart. Finally, we investigate the impact of different system parameters on the positioning accuracy of the proposed OFDM VLC system.