Error analysis on indoor localization with visible light communication

Abstract

Affected by the complexity of the indoor environment, accurate indoor positioning is challenging in many localization based services (LBS). Recently, it has been recognized that, visible light communication (VLC) is promising for indoor navigation and positioning, due to the low implementation cost with marginal modification to the existing infrastructure and the possibility to achieve high accurate positioning results. Provided that the positions of the light emitting diodes (LEDs) are known to the receiver, the angle of arrival (AOA) of the light signal is able to be estimated by a camera embedded in a smart phone, and thus the position of the smart phone can be derived based on the triangulation. In this paper, the performance of the positioning accuracy is analyzed based on indoor positioning with VLC, and the analytical upper bound of location error is derived. Extensive simulation results have verified the theoretical analysis on the VLC-based localization approach in different indoor scenarios. In order to obtain better location performance, the principles of choosing reference LED and localization LED are also given.