On Using Curved Mirrors to Decrease Shadowing in VLC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of curved mirrors in visible light communication to reduce shadowing effects and enhance signal coverage, demonstrating their potential to significantly outperform static plane mirrors in indoor VLC scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of using static curved mirrors, such as paraboloid and semi-spherical types, to improve VLC coverage and reduce shadowing, supported by analytical and numerical analysis.

Findings

Curved mirrors can reduce shadowing probability to near zero.

Static plane mirrors have shadowing probabilities over 65%.

Curved mirrors can maintain connectivity despite line-of-sight blockages.

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) complements radio frequency in indoor environments with large wireless data traffic. However, VLC is hindered by dramatic path losses when an opaque object is interposed between the transmitter and the receiver. Prior works propose the use of plane mirrors as optical reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ORISs) to enhance communications through non-line-of-sight links. Plane mirrors rely on their orientation to forward the light to the target user location, which is challenging to implement in practice. This paper studies the potential of curved mirrors as static reflective surfaces to provide a broadening specular reflection that increases the signal coverage in mirror-assisted VLC scenarios. We study the behavior of paraboloid and semi-spherical mirrors and derive the irradiance equations. We provide extensive numerical and analytical results and show that curved mirrors, when developed with proper dimensions, may reduce the shadowing probability to zero, while static plane mirrors of the same size have shadowing probabilities larger than 65%. Furthermore, the signal-to-noise ratio offered by curved mirrors may suffice to provide connectivity to users deployed in the room even when a line-of-sight link blockage occurs.