In visible light communication (VLC), the quality of communication is primarily dominated by line-of-sight links. To ensure an appropriate link quality anywhere, beamsteering has been proposed where transmitters (TXs) dynamically steer their beams to create beamspots on the users. However, these highly dynamic TXs face the beam tracking problem and result in highly variable illumination. In this work, we propose BlendVLC, a cell-free network architecture to improve the mobility robustness of users by blending the beamspots from both steerable and fixed TXs. We solve the beam tracking by designing a centimeter-level visible light positioning algorithm empowered by a neural network. Relying on this location information, we formulate and solve an optimization problem on the beamspot blending, and design a fast and scalable heuristic for large networks. We build a proof-of-concept testbed as well as a simulator to evaluate BlendVLC. We show that it achieves superior performance compared to denser networks with fully fixed TXs. For example, in a large-scale VLC network of 8 m x 4 m, BlendVLC improves the average system throughput by 30%, while only requiring half the number of TXs.@en

Visible light positioning (VLP) based on the received signal strength (RSS) can leverage a dense deployment of LEDs in future lighting infrastructure to provide accurate and energy-efficient indoor positioning. However, its positioning accuracy heavily depends on the density of collected fingerprints, which is labor-intensive. In this work, we propose a data pre-processing method, including data cleaning and data augmentation, to construct reliable and dense fingerprint samples, thereby alleviating the impact of noisy samples as well as reducing labor intensity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves an average positioning error of 1.7 cm, utilizing a sparse dataset that reduces the fingerprint collection effort by 98 percent. Running a tinyML-based model for VLP on the Arduino Nano microcontroller, we also show the possibilities for deploying RSS fingerprint-based VLP systems on resource-constrained embedded devices for real-world applications.@en

Visible light positioning (VLP) based on the received signal strength (RSS) can leverage a dense deployment of LEDs in future lighting infrastructure to provide accurate and energy-efficient indoor positioning. However, its positioning accuracy heavily depends on the density of collected fingerprints, which is labor-intensive. In this work, we propose a data pre-processing method, including data cleaning and data augmentation, to construct reliable and dense fingerprint samples, thereby alleviating the impact of noisy samples as well as reducing labor intensity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves an average positioning error of 1.7 cm, utilizing a sparse dataset that reduces the fingerprint collection effort by 98 percent. Running a tinyML-based model for VLP on the Arduino Nano microcontroller, we also show the possibilities for deploying RSS fingerprint-based VLP systems on resource-constrained embedded devices for real-world applications.@en