Cooperative transmission scheme to address random orientation and blockage events in VLC systems

Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising communication technology that paves the way to the Internet of Things. The forthcoming Industry 4.0 requires reliable high-speed communication links, which can be easily fulfilled with the massive adoption of the VLC technology. However, in VLC indoor communication environments, line-of-sight link blockages and strong misalignment losses between the light-emitting diode (LED) transmitters and the photodiode (PD) receivers are usual problems that must be tackled. This paper proposes a coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission technique to deal with both issues, and carries out a detailed evaluation of the VLC system performance as function of the PD receiver orientation and the density of obstacles in different scenarios. The proposed cooperative transmission scheme demonstrates an improvement in the average cell data rate and outage probability performance and, as a consequence, justifies the use of CoMP techniques to provide reliable VLC services in ultra-dense small cell scenarios indoors.