Dual-Mode LED Aided Visible Light Positioning System Under Multi-Path Propagation: Design and Demonstration

In this paper, we propose a novel visible light positioning (VLP) scheme under multi-path propagation, which is a practical scenario that has not been well studied for VLP. The new scheme exploits the so-called dual-mode light-emitting diode (DM-LED) of different radiation lobe mode numbers at the transmitter and a photodiode at the receiver. Specifically, we devise a method that utilizes a radiation angle measurement approach for DM-LED, derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the estimated distance and analyze the characteristics of key parameters. In addition, two localization algorithms based on linear and nonlinear least squares methods are developed. Simulation results show that under the ideal light-of-sight scenario, the CRLB of the proposed VLP scheme can be close to that of the conventional received signal strength (RSS) aided VLP scheme. Furthermore, we implement the first ever prototype DM-LED lamp to validate the new DM-LED aided VLP system model. Both simulation and experiment results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms its RSS-aided VLP counterpart in terms of positioning accuracy in the more realistic, and thus more challenging multi-path scenario, even with a tilting receiver.