Multi-cell VLC System and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Connecting the dots

The several advantages of visible light communication (VLC) have made it a potentially competent candidate for future communication technology. The reliability of the VLC system depends on the line-of-sight (LOS) links. However, surrounding environments pose unique challenges, frequently causing LOS blockages. The reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) also known as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) is a collection of tunable passive elements that have proven their ability in RF communication to manipulate and control the transmitted/reflected RF signals by changing the orientation or phases of RIS. RIS is anticipated to play a crucial role in enhancing VLC by shadowing compensation, extending coverage by controlling the beam directions and improving communication reliability by mitigating interferences. This work delves into the emerging field of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and their transformative role in multi-cell indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems. A RIS-based indoor multi-cell system model is developed for the purpose of mitigating inter-channel interference (ICI) issues during LOS blockages. The SINR performance of the proposed system is estimated for four different scenarios. Results show that the integration of RIS in between VLC channels can enhance the detector’s received power up to 27 times compared to the power received from the LOS and NLOS channels. Moreover, incorporating RIS has raised the average SINR value by 25% during no blockage and more than 70.4% during the blockage.