Design and optimization of indoor optical wireless positioning systems

Optical wireless (OW) technologies are an emerging field utilizing optical sources to replace existing radio wavelength technologies. The vast majority of work in OW focuses on communication; however, one smaller emerging field is indoor OW positioning. This emerging field essentially aims to replace GPS indoors. One of the primary competing methods in indoor OW positioning is angle-of-arrival (AOA). AOA positioning uses the received vectors from several optical beacons to triangulate its position. The reliability of this triangulation is fundamentally based on two aspects: the geometry of the optical receiver's location compared to the optical beacon locations, and the ability for the optical receiver to resolve the incident vectors correctly. The optical receiver is quantified based on the standard deviation of the azimuthal and polar angles that define the measured vector. The quality of the optical beacon geometry is quantified using dilution of precision (DOP). This proceeding discusses the AOA standard deviation of an ultra-wide field-of-view (FOV) lens along with the DOP characteristics for several optical beacon geometries. The optical beacon geometries used were simple triangle, square, and hexagon optical beacon geometries. To assist the implementation of large optical beacon geometries it is proposed to use both frequency and wavelength division multiplexing. It is found that with an ultra-wide FOV lens, coupled with the appropriately sized optical beacon geometry, allow for high accuracy positioning over a large area. The results of this work will enable reliable OW positioning deployments.