Impact of Random Receiver Orientation on Visible Light Communications Channel

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how random receiver orientation impacts the reliability of VLC channels, providing a unified analytical framework and validating it with extensive simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analytical model for VLC channels considering random receiver orientation and user mobility, extending to multiple transmitters.

Findings

Analytical model accurately predicts channel distribution and error rates.

Random orientation significantly affects VLC link reliability.

Model applicable to various receiver orientation and location scenarios.

Abstract

Visible Light Communications (VLC) has been studied thoroughly in recent years as an alternative or complementary technology to radio frequency communications. The reliability of VLC channels highly depends on the availability and alignment of line of sight links. In this work, we study the effect of random receiver orientation for mobile users over VLC downlink channels, which affects the existence of line of sight links and the receiver field of view. Based on the statistics of vertical receiver orientation and user mobility, we develop a unified analytical framework to characterize the statistical distribution of VLC downlink channels, which is then utilized to obtain the outage probability and the bit error rate. Our analysis is generalized for arbitrary distributions of receiver orientation/location for a single transmitter, and extended to multiple transmitter case for certain scenarios. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations show a perfect match between the analytical and the simulation data in terms of both the statistical channel distribution and the resulting bit error rate. Our results also characterize the channel attenuation due to random receiver orientation/location for various scenarios of interest.