The evolving explosion in high data rate services and applications will soon require the use of untapped, abundant unregulated spectrum of the visible light for communications to adequately meet the demands of the fifth-generation (5G) mobile technologies. Radio-frequency (RF) networks are proving to be too scarce to cover the escalation in data rate services. Visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a great potential solution, either in replacement of, or a complement to, existing RF networks, to support the projected traffic demands. Despite the prolific advantages of VLC networks, VLC faces many challenges that must be resolved in the near future to achieve full standardization and to be integrated to future wireless systems. Here, we review the emerging research in the field of VLC networks and lay out the challenges, technological solutions, and future work predictions. Specifically, we first review the VLC channel capacity derivation and discuss the performance metrics and the associated variables. The optimization of VLC networks are also discussed, including resources and power allocation techniques, user-to-access point (AP) association and APs-to-clustered-users-association, APs coordination techniques, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) VLC networks, simultaneous energy harvesting and information transmission using the visible light, and the security issues in VLC networks. Finally, we propose several open research problems to optimize the various VLC networks by maximizing either the sum rate, fairness, energy efficiency, secrecy rate, or harvested energy.
Some review articles focused on specific aspects of VLC such as VLC channel modeling methods @cite_47 , noise optical sources and noise mitigation mechanisms @cite_57 , VLC-based positioning techniques for indoor and outdoor applications @cite_18 , and the pertinent issues associated with the outdoor usage of VLC in vehicular communication @cite_177 . They generally identified emerging challenges and proposed future research directions.
@cite_57 @cite_177 @cite_47 @cite_18
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In the context of an increasing interest toward reducing the number of traffic accidents and of associated victims, communication-based vehicle safety applications have emerged as one of the best solutions to enhance road safety. In this area, visible light communications (VLC) have a great potential for applications due to their relatively simple design for basic functioning, efficiency, and large geographical distribution. This paper addresses the issues related to the VLC usage in vehicular communication applications, being the first extensive survey dedicated to this topic. Although VLC has been the focus of an intensive research during the last few years, the technology is still in its infancy and requires continuous efforts to overcome the current challenges, especially in outdoor applications, such as the automotive communications. This paper is aimed at providing an overview of several research directions that could transform VLC into a reliable component of the transportation infrastructure. The main challenges are identified and the status of the accomplishments in each direction is presented, helping one to understand what has been done, where the technology stands and what is still missing. The challenges for VLC usage in vehicle applications addressed by this survey are: 1) increasing the robustness to noise; 2) increasing the communication range; 3) enhancing mobility; 4) performing distance measurements and visible light positioning; 5) increasing data rate; 6) developing parallel VLC; and 7) developing heterogeneous dedicated short range communications and VLC networks. Addressing and solving these challenges lead to the perspective of fully demonstrating the high potential of VLC, and therefore, to enable the VLC usage in road safety applications. This paper also proposes several future research directions for the automotive VLC applications and offers a brief review on the associated standardization activities. As Global Positioning System (GPS) cannot provide satisfying performance in indoor environments, indoor positioning technology, which utilizes indoor wireless signals instead of GPS signals, has grown rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, visible light communication (VLC) using light devices such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been deemed to be a promising candidate in the heterogeneous wireless networks that may collaborate with radio frequencies (RF) wireless networks. In particular, light-fidelity has a great potential for deployment in future indoor environments because of its high throughput and security advantages. This paper provides a comprehensive study of a novel positioning technology based on visible white LED lights, which has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. The essential characteristics and principles of this system are deeply discussed, and relevant positioning algorithms and designs are classified and elaborated. This paper undertakes a thorough investigation into current LED-based indoor positioning systems and compares their performance through many aspects, such as test environment, accuracy, and cost. It presents indoor hybrid positioning systems among VLC and other systems (e.g., inertial sensors and RF systems). We also review and classify outdoor VLC positioning applications for the first time. Finally, this paper surveys major advances as well as open issues, challenges, and future research directions in VLC positioning systems. Visible light communication VLC is a newly emerging technology, which integrates communications and lighting purposes, and has become a very active research topic in the areas of wireless communications. It is expected to become an important part of the next generation wireless communications because of its unique features in using unlicensed spectrum, support of high data rate, and its resistance to electromagnetic interferences. In this survey paper, we begin with a review on the basis of photometry, which is used to establish channel models of VLC systems. Then, we will continue to address various issues on the fundamental characteristic features of VLC systems, the impact of indoor environments on system performance, and the analysis and discussions of five different types of typical VLC channel models and other related parameters in VLC channel models. Finally, in terms of the future works, we will show the possible follow-up research focuses and directions as an effort to identify some new research topics on VLCs. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper presents a deep-learning (DL) based approach to the design of multi-colored visible light communication (VLC) systems where RGB light-emitting diode (LED) lamps accomplish multi-dimensional color modulation under color and illuminance requirements. It is aimed to identify a pair of multi-color modulation transmitter and receiver leading to efficient symbol recovery performance. To this end, an autoencoder (AE), an unsupervised deep learning technique, is adopted to train the end-to-end symbol recovery process that includes the VLC transceiver pair and a channel layer characterizing the optical channel along with additional LED intensity control features. As a result, the VLC transmitter and receiver are jointly designed and optimized. Intensive numerical results demonstrate that the learned VLC system outperforms existing techniques in terms of the average symbol error probability. This framework sheds light on the viability of DL techniques in the optical communication system design.