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.
This paper provides, in Section II, an overview of VLC technology, defines and discusses the objectives and constraints that must be taken into account when optimizing VLC networks. Special emphasis is placed on channel capacity derivations, and the unique properties of VLC. We also discuss the variables, parameters, and constraints having an impact on the performance of VLC networks. All optimization techniques are reviewed in Section III, including power and resource allocation, users-to-APs association, cell formation, and AP cooperation used for mitigating the disadvantages of VLC networks to improve performance. This important topic was previously investigated by Li @cite_202 . However, their study was focused on the difference between user-centric and network-centric cell formations, and the interference reduction techniques, whereas in this paper, we place our attention on the techniques, used in RF VLC and in VLC standalone networks, that are aimed at alleviating the limitations in VLC networks. In other words, we show how to formulate optimization problems, what are the techniques used for solving these optimization problems, how the different objectives, limitations, constraints are evaluated, and how added RF APs can remove stand-alone VLC network limitations.
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In order to counteract the explosive escalation of wireless tele-traffic, the communication spectrum has been gradually expanded from the conventional radio frequency (RF) band to the optical wireless (OW) domain. By integrating the classic RF band relying on diverse radio techniques and optical bands, the next-generation heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are expected to offer a potential solution for supporting the ever-increasing wireless tele-traffic. Owing to its abundant unlicensed spectral resources, visible light communications (VLC) combined with advanced illumination constitute a competent candidate for complementing the existing RF networks. Although the advantages of VLC are multi-fold, some challenges arise when incorporating VLC into the classic RF HetNet environments, which may require new system architectures. The user-centric (UC) design principle for VLC environments constitutes a novel and competitive design paradigm for the super dense multi-tier cell combinations of HetNets. The UC concept may be expected to become one of the disruptive techniques to be used in the forthcoming fifth-generation era. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of visible-light-aided OW systems with special emphasis on the design and optimization of VLC networks, where the radically new UC design philosophy is reviewed. Finally, design guidelines are provided for VLC 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. Due to severe inter-cell interference (ICI), the signal-to- interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) suffers from very significant fluctuation in indoor multi-cell visible light communication (VLC) systems, which greatly limits the overall system performance. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a generalized angle diversity receiver (ADR) structure to reduce SINR fluctuation in indoor multi-cell VLC systems. The generalized ADR consists of one top detector and multiple inclined side detectors. In an indoor multi-cell VLC system using the generalized ADR, the inclination angle of the side detectors is optimized in order to minimize the SINR fluctuation over the receiving plane, where the impact of receiver random rotation is considered. An optimized ADR with different numbers of detectors is analyzed with different LED layouts and diversity combining techniques in a typical indoor environment. Analytical results show that the SINR fluctuation is gradually reduced when more detectors are equipped in the optimized ADR. In an indoor two-cell VLC system, much more significant SINR fluctuation reduction is achieved by using select-best combining (SBC). However, nearly the same SINR fluctuations are obtained in an indoor four-cell VLC system when using SBC and maximal-ratio combining (MRC). By applying the optimized ADR, up to 15.9 and 32.4-dB SINR fluctuation reductions can be achieved in comparison to a conventional single-element receiver (SER) in indoor two-cell and four-cell VLC systems, respectively. 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. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems using multiple light emitting diode (LED) sources and photodiode (PD) detectors are attractive for visible light communication (VLC) as they offer a capacity gain proportional to the number of parallel single-input single-output (SISO) channels. MIMO VLC systems exploit the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a SISO channel offered due to typical illumination requirements to overcome the capacity constraints due to limited modulation bandwidth of LEDs. In this work, a modified singular value decomposition VLC (SVD-VLC) MIMO system is proposed. This system maximizes the data rate while maintaining the target illumination and allowing the channel matrix to vary in order to support mobility in a practical indoor VLC deployment. The upper bound on capacity of the proposed SVD-VLC MIMO system is calculated assuming an imaging receiver. The relationship between the proposed system performance and system parameters total power constraint, lens aperture and random receiver locations are described. Over the past decade, visible light communication (VLC) systems have typically operated between 50 Mbps and 3.4 Gbps. In this paper, we propose and evaluate mobile VLC systems that operate at 10 Gbps. The enhancements in channel bandwidth and data rate are achieved by the introduction of laser diodes (LDs), angle diversity receivers (ADR), imaging receivers, relay nodes, and delay adaptation techniques. We propose three mobile VLC systems: an ADR relay assisted LD-VLC, an imaging relay assisted LD-VLC (IMGR-LD), and select-the-best imaging relay assisted LD-VLC. The ADR and imaging receiver are proposed for the VLC system to mitigate the intersymbol interference, maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and reduce the impact of multipath dispersion due to mobility. The combination of IMGR-LD with a delay adaptation technique adds a degree of freedom to the link design, which results in a VLC system that has the ability to provide high data rates under mobility. The proposed IMGR-LD system achieves significant improvements in the SNR over other systems in the worst case scenario in the considered real indoor environment. 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. 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. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a natural and effective way to increase the capacity of white light-emitting diode (LED) based visible light communication (VLC) systems. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) using high-order modulation is another widely used technique in VLC systems. Due to the intensity modulation and direct detection nature of VLC systems, Hermitian symmetry is usually imposed in OFDM so as to obtain a real-valued signal. In this paper, we investigate a non-Hermitian symmetry OFDM (NHS-OFDM) scheme for MIMO-VLC systems. By transmitting the real and imaginary parts of a complex-valued OFDM signal via a pair of white LEDs, NHS-OFDM circumvents the constraint of Hermitian symmetry. We evaluate the performance of an indoor 2×2 MIMO-VLC system using conventional Hermitian symmetry-based OFDM (HS-OFDM) and NHS-OFDM, where both a non-imaging receiver and an imaging receiver are considered. Analytical results show that the system using NHS-OFDM achieves superior bit error rate (BER) performance to that using HS-OFDM, with lower or nearly the same computational complexity. The superior BER performance of NHS-OFDM-based MIMO-VLC is further verified by experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that, in a 400 Mb s2×2 MIMO-VLC system with an imaging receiver, NHS-OFDM improves the communication coverage by about 30 compared with conventional HS-OFDM for a target BER of 3.8×10−3. Visible light communication (VLC) systems have typically operated at data rates below 20 Gbps and operation at this data rate was shown to be feasible by using laser diodes (LDs), beam steering, imaging receivers and delay adaptation techniques. However, an increase in the computational cost is incurred. In this paper, we introduce fast computer generated holograms (FCGHs) to speed up the adaptation process. The new, fast and efficient fully adaptive VLC system can improve the receiver signal to noise ratio (SNR) and reduce the required time to estimate the position of the VLC receiver. In addition, an imaging receiver and a delay adaptation technique are used to reduce the effect of inter symbol interference (ISI) and multipath dispersion. Significant enhancements in the SNR, with VLC channel bandwidths of more than 36 GHz are obtained resulting in a compact impulse response and a VLC system that is able to achieve higher data rates (25 Gbps) with full mobility in the considered indoor environment. This paper develops a deep learning framework for the design of on-off keying (OOK) based binary signaling transceiver in dimmable visible light communication (VLC) systems. The dimming support for the OOK optical signal is achieved by adjusting the number of ones in a binary codeword, which boils down to a combinatorial design problem for the codebook of a constant weight code (CWC) over signal-dependent noise channels. To tackle this challenge, we employ an autoencoder (AE) approach to learn a neural network of the encoder-decoder pair that reconstructs the output identical to an input. In addition, optical channel layers and binarization techniques are introduced to reflect the physical and discrete nature of the OOK-based VLC systems. The VLC transceiver is designed and optimized via the end-to-end training procedure for the AE. Numerical results verify that the proposed transceiver performs better than baseline CWC schemes. In this letter, we propose a new decoding algorithm based on a soft run-length limited (RLL) decoding in visible light communication (VLC) with on-off keying modulation and Reed-Solomon codes. Conventional RLL codes are used for dimming adjustments in VLC; however, in our receiver model, the proposed RLL decoder produces one or multiple candidates with greater probabilities to enhance the throughput in the VLC system. We also propose a selection method based on a cyclic redundancy check among multiple candidates. A significant advantage of our proposed method is that it leads to performance enhancement without any change in the transmitter in VLC systems. Simulation results show that the bit error rate of our proposed method is better than that of RLL hard decoding. In this letter, we propose a new decoding algorithm based on a soft-input soft-output run-length limited (RLL) decoder in visible light communication (VLC) with on–off keying (OOK) modulation and Reed–Solomon (RS) codes. Conventional RLL codes are used for dimming adjustments in VLC; however, in our receiver model, the posterior probability matrix is produced by the new RLL decoder, and it can be matched as the input of the soft RS decoder to enhance the throughput in the VLC system. A significant advantage of our proposed method is that it leads to the enhancement of bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) performances without any change in the transmitter in VLC systems. The simulation results show that the majority of the BER and FER performances of our proposed method are better than those of hard-input hard-output RLL decoding and soft-input hard-output RLL decoding methods. For visible light communications (VLCs), dimming support is desirable to provide variable levels of lighting brightness. When error correction coding schemes are used for VLC systems, different code rates should be employed according to target dimming levels. In this letter, we propose a coding scheme, which can provide a wide range of brightness and a simple encoding decoding structure for all different rates by using a rate-compatible punctured code. Puncturing patterns having the minimum bit error rate are provided by computer search. The results show that the VLC system with the proposed coding scheme can achieve optimum performances as well as a precise dimming support. In this letter, we proposed a bit-level soft (BLS) run-length limited (RLL) decoding algorithm for visible light communication (VLC). Conventional RLL encoding is only used for dimming control, and the lack of effective RLL decoding is a long-standing issue in VLC systems. Therefore, an RLL decoding method that utilizes soft information from the channel to produce BLS output is proposed for enhancing the performance of the system. The BLS RLL decoder is conjugated with a Reed-Solomon decoder that can efficiently utilize bit-level information from RLL decoding output. The simulation results show that the bit error rate performance of our proposed RLL decoding provides a significant gain over that of the conventional RLL decoding and compares favorably with that of the referenced RLL decoding methods. In this letter, a new dimming control system with polar codes is proposed for visible light communication (VLC). The polar codes are concatenated with run-length limited codes and compensation symbols that can be used in VLC dimming control; moreover, puncturing is used to shorten the code length and improve coding efficiency. To compare the proposed system with the referenced systems, non-systematic and systematic polar codes are also considered. The simulation results show that our proposed system provides better performance than referenced systems, which use low-density parity-check codes or Reed–Solomon codes for dimming control. This paper proposes two novel and practical designs of angle diversity receivers to achieve multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) capacity for indoor visible light communications (VLC). Both designs are easy to construct and suitable for small mobile devices. By using light emitting diodes for both illumination and data transmission, our receiver designs consist of multiple photodetectors (PDs), which are oriented with different inclination angles to achieve high-rank MIMO channels and can be closely packed without the requirement of spatial separation. Due to the orientations of the PDs, the proposed receiver designs are named pyramid receiver (PR) and hemispheric receiver (HR). In a PR, the normal vectors of PDs are chosen the same as the normal vectors of the triangle faces of a pyramid with equilateral @math -gon base. On the other hand, the idea behind HR is to evenly distribute the PDs on a hemisphere. Through analytical investigation, simulations and experiments, the channel capacity and bit-error-rate (BER) performance under various settings are presented to show that our receiver designs are practical and promising for enabling VLC-MIMO. In comparison to induced link-blocked receiver, our designs do not require any hardware adjustment at the receiver from location to location so that they can support user mobility. Besides, their channel capacities and BER performance are quite close to that of link-blocked receiver. Meanwhile, they substantially outperform spatially-separated receiver. This study reveals that using angle diversity to build VLC-MIMO system is very promising. In this letter, we propose a novel forward error correction (FEC) coding method using a modified Reed-Muller (RM) code for providing accurate dimming control in on-off keying (OOK) based visible light communication (VLC) systems. The proposed FEC scheme has a property that produces exactly same occurrence probability of 1's and 0's. Therefore, it can contain minimal compensation symbols in supporting multiple dimming target values. Moreover, VLC with our proposed scheme provides more coding gain than VLC scheme with the conventional FEC codes [the first-order RM and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes]. Simulation results for various dimming target values show that the proposed scheme leads to at least 2 dB or more signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain in 1 bit error rate (BER) than two FEC codes. In this paper, we experimentally realized a gigabit-class indoor visible light communication system using commercially available RGB White LED and exploiting an optimized DMT modulation. We achieved data rate of 1.5 Gbit s with single channel and 3.4 Gbit s by implementing WDM transmission at standard illumination levels. In both experiments, the resulting bit error ratios were below the FEC limit. To the best of our knowledge, these values are the highest ever achieved in VLC systems. In this letter, we propose an adaptive forward error correction scheme based on low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to efficiently adjust dimming values in visible light communication (VLC) systems. The proposed code is a quasi-cyclic LDPC code, in which extension and puncturing methods are used to maintain dimming control. The significant advantages of the proposed method are due to the lower number of codes required to support codes with different coding rate and the relatively small performance degradation for dimming control. Simulation results show that our proposed method efficiently maintains the dimming control in VLC systems with LDPC codes.