Joint Illumination and Communication Optimization in Indoor VLC for IoT Applications

Visible light communication (VLC) is one of the candidates to realize data rates of up to tera-bps in indoor scenarios, and is a popular topic in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the receiving performance of the VLC channel is affected by relative locations of transceivers directly, while the uniform illumination is also required when the IoT devices can appear anywhere with strong mobility. Consequently, both the illumination uniformity and the average achievable rate are optimized by joint lamp arrangement and power allocation in this article. Moreover, the achievable rate maximization under diverse uniformity constraints is also obtained based on different room sizes and various numbers of lamps. The feasibility and superiority of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated by simulation validations, while the lower and upper bounds of uniformity constraints are explored. Numerical results also show the changing tendency of average achievable rates in multifarious situations, and the proposed schemes realize the tradeoff between uniform illumination and communication performance.