Abstract
Visible Light Communication (VLC) has attracted significant attention over the past decade. Although numerous research studies have been performed to improve the data rate of VLC links, an important fact has been largely neglected: human bodies that host VLC receivers could block their Line-of-Sight (LOS) downlinks , and thus, degrade the system performance greatly. In this paper, we propose a system that can significantly improve the robustness for VLC networks by avoiding performance degradation due to blockage. A novel user-in-the-loop mechanism is designed in which users (including human bodies and VLC receivers) are guided by the network to rotate themselves to improve the system performance and the individual user experience. Both our simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed user-in-the-loop mechanism can improve the system throughput and user fairness on average by 48% and 14%, respectively. For individual users, the average gain in throughput can reach up to 135%. Furthermore, to make the system more practical, two lightweight heuristics are designed and implemented which can achieve similar gains while reducing the computational complexity by 99%.
Highlights
A RTIFICIAL lighting accounts for nearly 20% of the worldwide electricity consumption [2]
We argue that in reality, users would wish to rotate themselves to tackle the blockage issues caused by their bodies or exploit blockage to improve the system performance
We summarize our contributions in this work as follows: Contribution 1: We analyze the effect of blockage in Visible Light Communication (VLC) and show that user rotations, including the rotation of human bodies as well as the rotation of receivers, play an important role in the network
Summary
A RTIFICIAL lighting accounts for nearly 20% of the worldwide electricity consumption [2]. It shows that users’ participation, through the rotation of human body or the rotation of receiver, plays an important role to exploit the blockage or tackle the blockage issues caused by them and the possible surrounding environment Motivated by these observations, in this work we design a system that leverages users’ participation to improve the robustness of VLC to blockage, as well as to exploit the blockage for the performance improvement of VLC networks. We summarize our contributions in this work as follows: Contribution 1: We analyze the effect of blockage in VLC and show that user rotations, including the rotation of human bodies as well as the rotation of receivers, play an important role in the network. A discussion and conclusion on this work are presented in Section IX and Section X, respectively
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