Preliminary investigation of indoor positioning system using Visible Light Communication

Abstract

Indoor positioning research has been active for the past two decades. However no promising result has been identified for the position accuracy. Recently Light Emitting Diode (LED) lighting is used as a tool for the Visible Light Communication (VLC) research which opens a dimension in indoor positioning system (IPS). This paper presents a preliminary investigation of indoor positioning related to the accuracy of the position. In this proposed VLC-IPS, four LEDs are used as transmitters and a photodiode is used as receiver. The photodiode will obtain information from the transmitter to perform a coordinate estimation. A unique frequency modulation (F-ID) method is used on the transmitter to prevent interference; while on the receiver, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used to retrieve the transmitted signal. In the meantime, the received signal strength (RSS) and trilateral methods are used to estimate the distance between the transmitters and receiver which then will estimate the coordinate of the receiver. Simulation results show that the average error between the exact position and the predicted position of the proposed system is 0.79 cm.