A multi-cell lighting testbed for VLC and VLP

Abstract

Future deployments of LiFi will incorporate arrays of luminaires. We seek to explore the interactions among multiple users, mobility of devices, device orientation, and user traffic. We describe a new multi-cell lighting testbed created to study and optimize dense LiFi systems. The testbed is constructed with 15 commercial LED lights that are driven by custom LiFi drivers and a 16-channel software defined radio. We develop a model for the system for the purpose of predicting signal strength under mobility and different receiver orientations. Data collected in the testbed show good conformance to the model. Lastly, we show how the analytical model and the measured data can be used to study RSS-based VLP and VLC handover in multi-cell systems.