Three-Dimensional VLC Positioning Based on Angle Difference of Arrival With Arbitrary Tilting Angle of Receiver

Existing indoor positioning methods for visible-light communication systems require large database, powerful signal processing units, additional sensors, such as gyroscopes, or the receiver placed toward a certain angle. These assumptions limit the applications of the indoor positioning systems in low-cost scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel positioning framework based on the angle differences of arrival (ADOA) in 3-D coordinate systems, which can be used in receivers with image sensors or photodiodes. The proposed ADOA positioning does not require the receiver to be placed toward a certain angle and no additional sensor is required. Two positioning algorithms are proposed: one is based on the method of exhaustion (MEX), and the other is based on the least squares method (LSM). The MEX algorithm is analytically proved to be the optimal, while the LSM algorithm has much lower complexity. Both the upper and lower bounds are derived for the average discrepancy between the exact position and the estimated position. These performance bounds can facilitate the design of a light-emitting diode array. Experimental results show that the MEX algorithm can achieve an average error of 3.20 cm with a time cost of 0.36 s, and the LSM algorithm can achieve an average error of 14.66 cm with a time cost of 0.001 s.