BlendVLC

A cell-free VLC network architecture empowered by beamspot blending

Conference Paper (2021)
Author(s)

Jona Beysens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

Q. Wang (TU Delft - Embedded Systems)

Maxim Van Den Abeele (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

Sofie Pollin (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

Research Group
Embedded Systems
Copyright
© 2021 Jona Beysens, Q. Wang, Maxim Van Den Abeele, Sofie Pollin
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488727
More Info
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Publication Year
2021
Language
English
Copyright
© 2021 Jona Beysens, Q. Wang, Maxim Van Den Abeele, Sofie Pollin
Research Group
Embedded Systems
ISBN (electronic)
9780738112817
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Abstract

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.

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