Performance analysis of angle diversity multi-element receiver in indoor multi-cell visible light communication systems

Abstract

An indoor visible light communication (VLC) system using white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) usually consists of multiple optical attocells, such that it can achieve full coverage of an indoor environment. The performance of an indoor multi-cell VLC system could be significantly degraded by inter-cell interference (ICI). To address the ICI issue, we propose and investigate an angle diversity multi-element receiver (ADMER) for indoor multi-cell VLC systems. Our proposed ADMER consists of one top detector and five side detectors, which is optimized in terms of the half-angle field-of-view (FOV) of all the detectors and the inclination angle of the side detectors so as to achieve optimal performance. Impact of receiver random rotation is taken into consideration and receiver optimization is executed by maximizing the achievable average signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR). Our studies show that an indoor multi-cell VLC system using the proposed ADMER can not only effectively mitigate the ICI, but also has excellent robustness against receiver random rotation.