Design of Efficient Indoor Visible Light Communication Systems: From Theoretical Foundations to Practical Solutions

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The continuous proliferation of new information technology applications (social media, internet-of-things, etc) has on the one hand improved our quality of life, but on the other hand increased the load on radio-frequency (RF) communication systems to the limits. As a result, today's RF bands are not capable of supporting this load, leading to a performance bottleneck which can slow down technological development unless revolutionary solutions are found. This motivated researchers to explore new resources for supporting data-hungry applications. The optical spectrum offers such a resource, especially due to its wide license-free bandwidth. This promoted Optical Wireless Communications (OWC) as a potential candidate solution. ******For indoor applications, OWC can be established using LED light-fixtures. LEDs can also be used to connect cars with cars and/or infrastructure using car lights and light posts. This research area is known as Visible-Light Communication (VLC) and is very attractive for several reasons. First, it offloads a large portion of traffic from RF systems. Second, it has high energy-efficiency since it combines lighting and communication functionalities. This leads to high quality communication with less energy consumption for a Green future. ******Since VLC can lead to a new communication paradigm, designing reliable VLC techniques can lead to impactful discoveries in this field. Due to the physics of optical signals and propagation, research on RF communications does not directly apply to VLC. Therefore, there is need for a better understanding of VLC it terms of reliability, capacity, and network design. These form the main thrusts of this Discovery Program. Two important challenges can be identified in this regard. First, the nature of VLC leads to communication system models that are different from RF communications, which renders their study different in terms of reliability and capacity. Designing schemes which achieve optimal performance from these viewpoints while supporting multiple users is important for practical VLC systems. Second, VLC network design requires a good interface with other wired/RF communication networks which form the backbone of a VLC system. This calls for a larger network-level study of VLC for overcoming possible bottlenecks. ******As such, the goal of this Discovery Program is to build new fundamental knowledge for multi-user VLC systems from a theoretical point-of-view, and to demonstrate the theoretical results practically using experiments, all while maintaining a large-scale holistic view. It is expected that the innovative and impactful results of this research will form the foundations of a fully operational VLC system as an important ingredient of next generation wireless networks, and will provide communications engineers and industry with benchmarks for efficient VLC system design.