Indoor visible light communication without line of sight: investigation and performance analysis

Visible light communication (VLC) using indoor LED lighting generally assumes the existence of line of sight link in addition to multipath, delayed, lower power reflections. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to establish VLC links in shadowed areas, i.e., where the line of sight is blocked or unavailable. First, we study the system performance in terms of received power, SNR, BER, and rms delay spread. The results show acceptable, yet promising performance of $$\hbox {BER}=1.2\times 10^{-3}$$BER=1.2×10-3 in worst non-line of sight case. Second, we define three configuration scenarios for receiver’s PD orientation in which line of sight is absent. For each scenario, we evaluate the link performance. Our analysis shows that the system performance can be potentially improved when MIMO is considered for locations that have low performance with single photodetector.