Joint Light Planning and Error-Rate Prediction for Dual-Use Lighting/Visible Light Communication

We consider error-rate prediction for dual-use lighting systems with visible light communication (VLC) functionality. Since light planning rather than communications engineering is usually the driving discipline for practical dual-use settings, we extract VLC channel parameters as a by-product from advanced 3-dimensional (3D) light-planning models. By this means, we attain realistic signal-to-noise ratios for exemplary positions of a VLC receiver, which allows us to predict corresponding end-to-end bit error rates (BERs). Specifically, our procedure accounts for important aspects of state-of-art lighting systems, such as realistic light distribution curves of employed luminaires, possible presence unmodulated light sources, and, particularly, adaptive dimming operations in response to prevalent sunlight. In this paper, we (i) devise a methodology for VLC systems with optical receive filtering to convert photometric quantities into radiometric quantities, (ii) present examples of BER predictions for selected modulation schemes within some basic office environments, and (iii) conduct an analysis of the resulting simulation accuracy for a particular 3D light-planning tool. Simulation results show that our approach is indeed suited to predict realistic end-to-end BERs for dual-use lighting/VLC systems. Moreover, our procedure is fairly general and may be tailored to specific practical office settings and particular light plans of interest.