Indoor positioning systems based on visible light communication (VLC) using white light-emitting diodes (WLEDs) have been widely studied in the literature. In this paper, we present an indoor visible-light positioning (VLP) system based on red–green–blue (RGB) LEDs and a frequency division multiplexing (FDM) scheme. This system combines the functions of an FDM scheme at the transmitters (RGB LEDs) and a received signal strength (RSS) technique to estimate the receiver position. The contribution of this work is two-fold. First, a new VLP system with RGB LEDs is proposed for a multi-cell network. Here, the RGB LEDs allow the exploitation of the chromatic space to transmit the VLP information. In addition, the VLC receiver leverages the responsivity of a single photodiode for estimating the FDM signals in RGB lighting channels. A second contribution is the derivation of an expression to calculate the optical power received by the photodiode for each incident RGB light. To this end, we consider a VLC channel model that includes both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) components. The fast Fourier transform (FFT) estimates the powers and frequencies of the received FDM signal. The receiver uses these optical signal powers in the RSS-based localization application to calculate the Euclidean distances and the frequencies for the RGB LED position. Subsequently, the receiver’s location is estimated using the Euclidean distances and RGB LED positions via a trilateration algorithm. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are performed to evaluate the error performance of the proposed VLP system in a multi-cell scenario. The results show a high positioning accuracy performance for different color points. The average positioning error for all chromatic points was less than 2.2 cm. These results suggest that the analyzed VLP system could be used in application scenarios where white light balance or luminaire color planning are also the goals.

PIN (positive intrinsic negative) photodiodes and analog-to-digital converters (ADC) are commonly used on visible light communication (VLC) receivers in order to retrieve the data on detected signals. In this paper, a visible light communication receiver based on a light to frequency converter (LTF) is proposed. We characterized the LTF and derived an equation for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation in terms of its input optical power, and the frequency of the output periodic signal. The experiments show that the periodic signal of the LTF converter has a maximum output frequency of 600 kHz at a distance of 6.2 cm. In this setup, measured SNR reached 18.75 dB, while the lowest obtained SNR with 1.1 m length was roughly −35.1 dB. The results obtained suggest that a bit rate of 150 kbps can be achieved with an on-off keying (OOK) modulation format. We analyzed the results and discuss the advantages and limitations of the LTF converter for optical wireless communication purposes.

Colour-shift keying (CSK) is a visible light communication (VLC) modulation scheme used in the existing IEEE 802.15.7 standard. In CSK, information is transmitted by changing the light intensities of the RGB LEDs. In this work, a low-complexity VLC system is proposed using CSK modulation and a novel receiver based on a light-to-frequency (LTF) converter. At the receiver, CSK symbols are interpreted and decoded in terms of frequencies, which are processed by a counter module of a generic microcontroller, thus avoiding the use of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), which results in a low-cost VLC system. The main contributions of this work are summarized in the following key points: (1) A low-complexity receiver for CSK modulation is introduced; (2) A particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for CSK constellation design is suggested considering the restrictions of the LTF based receiver; (3) Experimental and theoretical validation is perfomed for the proposed multi-colour VLC system. The results show that this system can provide a transmission speed of 100 kbps using a 4-CSK-LTF constellation for a symbol error rate (SER) of 10 − 4 and a signal to noise ratio (SNR) around 35 dB. These results suggest that the analysed system could find applications on those scenarios where low transmission speeds and ease of deployment are the goals.

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This paper presents the first experimental demonstration of gRPC-based SDN control and telemetry architecture for spectral/spatial super-channels with SDM/WDM transceivers that monitor the BER to detect soft-failures over an 11-km 6mode 19-core fiber. An evaluation of possible SDN protocols is provided for the discussed scenario.