Experimental demonstration of an indoor visible light communication positioning system using dual-tone multi-frequency technique

In this paper, a visible light communication (VLC)-based indoor positioning system (IPS) employing a dedicated algorithm and using the dual-tone multi-frequency technique is proposed. Unlike the time-division multiplexing based VLC-IPS, the proposed positioning system doesn't require synchronization between the transmitter and receiver, which makes it a simple, robust and cost effective. To test the accuracy of the proposed method, an experimental test-bed using 3 white light-emitting diodes and a photomultiplier tube is developed. The results show that the proposed VLC-IPS is highly accurate with an average positioning error of about 1.6cm, which far lower than many existing indoor position systems.