Performance estimation of indoor optical wireless communication systems using OMNeT++

Optical wireless communication (OWC) or visible light communication (VLC) has recently experienced a significant growth in interest. Due to the vast bandwidth available in the unlicensed light spectrum, the ascent of LED-based lighting, inherent security and EM benefits, OWC can be regarded as an attractive alternative to commonly available RF-based communication, specifically Wi-Fi. With its importance grows the need for properly matched system models and tools for exploration of the OWC-specific design space in order to predict system performance under real-life conditions. Therefore, a simulation model for the discrete event-based simulation framework OMNeT++ was created, which precisely models transmissions on the physical level in LOS scenarios and enables quantitative impact analysis of changes in either the optical front-ends or the simulated scenario, e.g. field of view (FOV), position and orientation of transmitter and receiver. The physical characteristics of the simulation model have been verified against measurements performed with an actual OWC system. In order to illustrate design space exploration capabilities of our simulation model, four case studies are presented involving changes to transmission aspects, e.g. modulation scheme or type of FEC, or the utilized protocols. Each demonstrates the possibility to quantify the impact of static and dynamic parameter changes on the resulting system performance parameters, such as throughput and covered area.