Diversity combining and piezoelectric beam steering for multi-element VLC networks

Abstract

Visible light communications (VLC) is an emerging wireless communication technology that can serve high speed data rates by using existing lighting infrastructure without congesting the radio spectrum. This paper studies the effect of various multi-element VLC transmitter and receiver configurations on the link quality. With this purpose, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) distribution is investigated via extensive simulations considering a multipath environment with different transceiver configurations and diversity combining techniques. Additionally, we propose a beam steering technique using the piezo-electric based tilting of LEDs to improve the SINR, which tilts the LEDs with piezoelectric actuators towards the location of the receiver. Simulation results show that significant gains can be obtained on SINR performance by using optimized transceiver configurations and diversity combining at the receiver. Moreover, even with small titling angles at the transmitter, up to 12 dB SINR gain is obtained using beam steering.