Abstract
Optical wireless LANs (OWLs) constitute an emerging networking paradigm for indoor scenarios’ fit to different smart cities’ fields of applications. Commercial products employing this technology have been made available on the market in recent years. In this work, we investigate, through a set of indoor communication experiments based on commercially available products, how different environmental and usage modes affect the performance of the system, addressing the presence of multiple users, the position and mobility of the mobile devices, the handover among adjacent cells and the effect of background lighting. Our finding shows that the system is quite robust with respect to the variation of operational conditions. We show that, in most conditions, the links can reliably sustain a stable throughput, achieving at least 50% of the throughput achieved with using the maximum light intensity of the transmitting lamp, while they are affected in a very mild way by factors like position and height of the mobile device, and virtually unaffected by variations in the background light.
Highlights
This work is organized as follows: in Sections 2 and 3 we provide some background information on the applications in indoor smart city environments (Section 2) and on the IR/visible light communications (VLC) technology (Section 3)
Later studies based on low cost single chip white Light emitting diodes (LEDs), that were made available on the market in the mid 2000s, presented prototypes achieving tens Mbps [39,40], up to 100 Mbps [4] by 2009
We have presented the results of a series of tests performed by us to investigate the dependence of the performance of an IR/VLC based LAN from different environmental and deployment factors in an indoor environment
Summary
Later studies based on low cost single chip white LEDs (i.e., capable of covering the entire visible light spectrum with a single LED, as opposed to the use of three LEDs to obtain red, green, and blue emissions), that were made available on the market in the mid 2000s, presented prototypes achieving tens Mbps [39,40], up to 100 Mbps [4] by 2009 These works deal with one of the major problems of VLC systems, i.e. the need to equalize the LED spectrum response, which has a limited modulation bandwidth. To cope with user mobility in the handover of users among cells [51]
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