Direct and Two-Step Positioning in Visible Light Systems

Visible light positioning (VLP) systems based on light emitting diodes can facilitate high accuracy localization services for indoor scenarios. In this paper, direct and two-step positioning approaches are investigated for both synchronous and asynchronous VLP systems. First, the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and the direct positioning-based maximum likelihood estimator are derived for 3-D localization of a visible light communication receiver in a synchronous scenario by utilizing information from both time delay parameters and channel attenuation factors. Then, a two-step position estimator is designed for synchronous VLP systems by exploiting the asymptotic properties of time-of-arrival and received signal strength estimates. The proposed two-step estimator is shown to be asymptotically optimal, i.e., converges to the direct estimator at high signal-to-noise ratios. In addition, the CRLB and the direct and two-step estimators are obtained for positioning in asynchronous VLP systems. It is proved that the two-step position estimation is optimal in asynchronous VLP systems for practical pulse shapes. Various numerical examples are provided to illustrate the improved performance of the proposed estimators with respect to the current state-of-the-art and to investigate their robustness against model uncertainties in VLP systems.