Design and experimental demonstration of mirror-aided non-imaging receiver for indoor MIMO-VLC systems

Visible light communication (VLC) has attracted great attention with the development of the emerging solid-state lighting sources. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique is promising to support high data rate VLC thanks to the deployment of multiple lighting sources. However, high channel correlation in indoor MIMO-VLC channels is critical to the performance of indoor MIMO-VLC systems. The advanced non-imaging receivers in recent works reduce the channel correlation by directivity for each photodetector (PD) by interfering the reception of light oriented in the specific direction. Contrary to previous works, we propose in this paper a new mirror-embedded non-imaging receiver which not only blocks the reception of light on one specific direction but also improves the channel gain on the other direction by receiving the light reflected by a double-sided mirror deployed between the PDs. Numerical results and experimental demonstration show that our proposed mirror diversity receiver (MDR) are more beneficial to obtain well-conditioned channel matrices for spatial-multiplexing MIMO-VLC systems supporting high speed data transmission.