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

新的信息技术应用（社交媒体、物联网等）的不断扩散一方面提高了我们的生活质量，但另一方面也将射频（RF）通信系统的负载增加到了极限。因此，目前的RF频段无法支持这种负载，导致性能瓶颈，除非找到革命性的解决方案，否则会减缓技术发展。这促使研究人员探索新的资源，以支持数据密集型应用。光谱提供了这样的资源，特别是由于其宽的免许可证带宽。这促进了光无线通信（OWC）作为潜在的候选解决方案。对于室内应用，可以使用LED灯具建立OWC。LED还可以用于使用车灯和灯柱将汽车与汽车和/或基础设施连接。这个研究领域被称为可见光通信（VLC），由于几个原因而非常有吸引力。首先，它从RF系统卸载了大部分流量。其次，它具有高能效，因为它结合了照明和通信功能。这将为绿色未来带来高质量的通信和更少的能耗。由于VLC可以导致一种新的通信范式，因此设计可靠的VLC技术可以在该领域产生有影响力的发现。由于光信号和传播的物理特性，对RF通信的研究并不直接适用于VLC。因此，需要更好地了解VLC的可靠性，容量和网络设计。这些构成了这个探索计划的主要目标。在这方面可以确定两个重要挑战。首先，VLC的性质导致通信系统模型不同于RF通信，这使得它们的研究在可靠性和容量方面不同。设计方案，实现最佳的性能，从这些观点，同时支持多个用户是重要的实际VLC系统。其次，VLC网络设计需要与形成VLC系统的骨干的其他有线/RF通信网络的良好接口。这就要求对VLC进行更大规模的网络级研究，以克服可能的瓶颈。因此，该发现计划的目标是从理论角度为多用户VLC系统建立新的基础知识，并使用实验实际演示理论结果，同时保持大规模的整体视图。预计这项研究的创新性和影响力的结果将成为下一代无线网络的重要组成部分，并将为通信工程师和行业提供高效VLC系统设计的基准。

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.