Investigating Human Impediments to Indoor Visible Light Communications

In recent years, visible-light communication (VLC) has become increasingly popular. However, the system's performance is negatively impacted by the lack of attention to human body interference in line-of-sight downlinks. This work studies the impact of human-induced impediments on the performance of an indoor VLC system. Moreover, an overview of the related works was presented. These effects include line-of-sight (LOS) obstruction, shadowing, the dynamic nature of the human movement, reflection and scattering, interference from clothing and accessories, and multi-path fading. 2 and 4 LEDs were used to compare all effects, and the blockages were represented as cylinders with a specific height, hB, and base diameter D with one receiver. Results show that for the same overall power from the transmitted LEDs, the received signal strength is greater when using 4 LEDs as opposed to 2 LEDs.