Optical Beams Switching-Based Coverage Enhancement Scheme for Compact Visible Light Communications

Visible light communication (VLC) has been recognized as one promising candidate to satisfy the unprecedented throughput requirement of near-future mobile wireless networks. Due to the directional Lambertian optical beam-based design approach, multiple visible light transmitters are essential to provide sufficient coverage. However, these schemes could not meet spatial compactness requirements and fail to match harsher constrained transmitters or even single transmitter scenarios. To address these challenges, this article proposes a non-Lambertian optical beam switching-based dynamic coverage scheme for VLC mobility enhancement. Unlike the conventional Lambertian beam-based technique paradigm, the proposed scheme tentatively utilizes the commercially available asymmetric non-Lambertian beam to configure the VLC links with azimuth selectivity. Numerical results show that, for the solo visible light transmitter scenario, compared with the approximate 39.22 dB average signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the conventional Lambertian configuration, up to 5.27 dB average SNR gain is derived through the proposed dynamic scheme with four candidate non-Lambertian beams. Moreover, this potential gain will be further enhanced to about 13.24 dB when up to four visible light transmitters are available.

Automated summary

This article proposes a dynamic coverage scheme based on non-Lambertian optical beam switching to enhance the mobility of visible light communication. By utilizing azimuth selectivity in configuring VLC links with non-Lambertian beams, higher signal-to-noise ratio gains can be achieved compared to conventional schemes.