Investigation of Indoor Atmospheric Attenuation in Visible Light Positioning for Industrial Applications

In the past decade, visible light communication (VLC) technology has received increasing attention for numerous applications, including for indoor visible light positioning (VLP). The transmission medium for indoor VLP systems in industrial environments could include smoke particles, oil vapors, water mist, and industrial fumes. This work investigates the indoor atmospheric attenuation on the performance of VLP for industrial environments. The considered VLP technique uses trilateration based on the Cayley-Menger Determinant algorithm. The positioning method uses received signal strength (RSS) to estimate a drone’s position. Smoke and fog effects for the indoor atmospheric attenuations have been considered based on visibility (V) ranging from 0.3 km to 1 km. The results show that the positioning error increases from an average value of 6.53 cm for clear air to 46.64 cm in smoke and 46.27 cm in fog attenuation with reduced visibility (V=0.3 km), respectively. The results also show that there is a slightly lower received power in the presence of smoke, as compared to fog, for a given visibility range.