Effect of LED wiring and cabling topologies on visible light communication channels

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging short-range wireless access technology. It involves the dual use of illumination infrastructure for communication purposes and builds upon the principle of modulating light emitting diodes (LEDs) at very high speeds that are not noticeable to the human eye. Although there has been a growing literature on VLC channel modeling, the existing works mainly overlook the effects of wiring and cabling topologies. Wiring topology refers to how LED chips are connected within the luminaire while cabling topology refers to how the luminaires are connected to the communication access point. In this paper, we adopt ray-tracing based VLC channel modeling approach and consider various cabling/wiring topologies. For each topology, we obtain channel impulse responses (CIRs) and quantify the impact of wiring and cabling delays.