Exploring the feasibility of short-range VLC schemes in MIMO systems
Otsu Thresholding and Sliding Window Protocols
Alexandru Lolea (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Q. Wang – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
A. Kiste – Mentor (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
M.A. Neerincx – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
With radio communication bandwidth becoming increasingly scarce and expensive, researchers have turned toward the light medium, namely the field of Visible Light Communication (VLC). Although the field of Visible Light Communication (VLC) was pioneered in the late 1800s, it faced criticism from scientists of that era, with radio communications being preferred instead. VLC has since regained attention by complementing existing radio communication methods.
This research paper focuses on exploring different short-range multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) screen-to-camera VLC schemes operating solely on the red optical channel. The transmitting screen is a 4×6 LED grid on a prototype board, while the receiver is an off-the-shelf smartphone back camera. The chosen modulation technique is on-off keying (OOK) with Manchester encoding (ME), while demodulation is performed using three different strategies, the first two using Otsu thresholding and the last using a sliding window approach.
Our experiments show that, while the modulation scheme achieves a transmission rate of 6 symbols per LED per frame (up to 144 symbols per frame) and a bit error rate (BER) of less than 10⁻¹, the limited resolution and frame rate make it difficult to reliably include important data frame header fields such as the sequence number.