Angle diversity receiver as a key enabler for reliable ORIS-based Visible Light Communication

Visible Light Communication (VLC) offers a promising solution to satisfy the increasing demand for wireless data. However, link blockages remain a significant challenge. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the combined use of angle diversity receivers (ADRs) and optical reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ORISs) in multiuser VLC systems. We consider ORIS elements as small movable mirrors. We demonstrate the complementarity of ADR and ORIS in mitigating link blockages, as well as the advantages of using a larger number of ORIS elements due to the increased field-of-view (FoV) at the receiver enabled by the ADR. An optimization algorithm is proposed to maximize the minimum signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) to deploy a fair communication network. Numerical results show that integrating ADR and ORIS significantly enhances VLC communication performance, achieving an SNR gain of up to 30 dB compared to a system without ORIS, and mitigating communication outages produced by link blockages or out-of-FoV received signals. We also prove that an ADR with a single tier of photodiodes is sufficient to complement ORIS-assisted VLC.

ORIS allocation to minimize the outage probability in a multi-user VLC scenario

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a promising solution to address the growing demand for wireless data, leveraging the widespread use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as transmitters. However, its deployment is challenged by link blockages that cause connectivity outages. Optical reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ORISs) have recently emerged as a solution to mitigate these disruptions. This work considers a multi-user VLC system and investigates the optimal association of ORISs to LEDs and users to minimize the outage probability while limiting the number of ORISs used. Numerical results from our proposed optimization algorithm demonstrate that using ORISs can reduce the outage probability by up to 85% compared to a no-ORIS scenario.

On Using Curved Mirrors to Decrease Shadowing in VLC

Visible light communication (VLC) complements radio frequency in indoor environments with large wireless data traffic. However, VLC is hindered by dramatic path losses when an opaque object is interposed between the transmitter and the receiver. Prior works propose the use of plane mirrors as optical reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ORISs) to enhance communications through non-line-of-sight links. Plane mirrors rely on their orientation to forward the light to the target user location, which is challenging to implement in practice. This paper studies the potential of curved mirrors as static reflective surfaces to provide a broadening specular reflection that increases the signal coverage in mirror-assisted VLC scenarios. We study the behavior of paraboloid and semi-spherical mirrors and derive the irradiance equations. We provide extensive numerical and analytical results and show that curved mirrors, when developed with proper dimensions, may reduce the shadowing probability to zero, while static plane mirrors of the same size have shadowing probabilities larger than 65%. Furthermore, the signal-to-noise ratio offered by curved mirrors may suffice to provide connectivity to users deployed in the room even when a line-of-sight link blockage occurs.

Resource allocation exploiting reflective surfaces to minimize the outage probability in VLC

Visible light communication (VLC) is a technology that complements radio frequency (RF) to fulfill the ever-increasing demand for wireless data traffic. The ubiquity of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), exploited as transmitters, increases the VLC market penetration and positions it as one of the most promising technologies to alleviate the spectrum scarcity of RF. However, VLC deployment is hindered by blockage causing connectivity outages in the presence of obstacles. Recently, optical reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ORISs) have been considered to mitigate this problem. While prior works exploit ORISs for data or secrecy rate maximization, this paper studies the optimal placement of mirrors and ORISs, and the LED power allocation, for jointly minimizing the outage probability while keeping the lighting standards. We describe an optimal outage minimization framework and present solvable heuristics. We provide extensive numerical results and show that the use of ORISs may reduce the outage probability by up to 67% with respect to a no-mirror scenario and provide a gain of hundreds of kbit/J in optical energy efficiency with respect to the presented benchmark.