Impact of receiver orientation and position on Visible Light Communication link performance

Abstract

In this paper we study the impact of both receiver orientation and position on Visible Light Communication (VLC) performance when it is worn by a moving person in indoor environment. This is the case for example of a tablet or smartphone. Because of person mobility within the environment, there are cases where Line of Sight (LOS) paths from optical light sources at the ceiling cannot be collected by the receiver. In those cases, high order reflections are taken into account for channel modeling purpose. We evaluate the performance in term of outage probability and show that Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) impact is more important when considering receiver orientation variations and this all the more as the data rate is high. In addition for a given quality of service we determine the minimum transmitted power needed to achieve data rate up to 1 Gbps. We verify that considering at least 3 order reflection constitutes an accurate way to quantify the receiver orientation impact.