Owcsimpy: A 3D Simulator for Indoor Optical Wireless Channels

Abstract

In this paper, a 3D simulator for indoor optical wireless channels, named owcsimpy, is introduced. One of the advantages of owcsimpy is the ability to generate channel impulse responses (CIRs) with realistic environments. Envi-ronments with different furniture, blocking objects (such as human bodies), randomly-oriented stations, or mobile users can be modeled with owcsimpy. In addition, owcsimpy is a lightweight library that can be easily installed in many different machines, which makes it easy to produce a dataset of CIRs. In this paper, different use cases of owcsimpy are discussed. First, we demonstrate how to generate different scenarios ranging from a simple one, e.g., an indoor room with a light emitting diode (LED) and a photodiode (PD), to more complicated scenarios, e.g., an open office room with multiple LEDs and PDs. Second, CIRs that are generated by considering randomly-oriented mobile stations are used to calculate the coherence time of indoor wireless optical channels. Other potential applications of owcsimpy that show the advantage of the library to enable future research on LiFi are also presented at the end of the paper.