Improving Blockage Robustness in VLC Networks

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has attracted significant attention over the past decade. Although numerous research studies have been performed to improve the data rate of VLC links, an important fact has been largely neglected: users that host VLC receivers could block their tine-of-sight (LOS) downlinks, and thus, degrade the system performance greatly. In this paper, we propose NutVLC, a system that can significantly improve the blockage robustness for VLC networks. A novel user-in-the-loop mechanism is designed in which users are guided by the network to rotate themselves for the improvement of the system performance as well as the individual user experience. Both our simulation and experimental results demonstrate that NutVLC can improve the system throughput and user fairness on average by 46% and 15%, respectively. For individual users, the average gain in throughput can reach 132%. Further, to make NutVLC more practical, two lightweight heuristics are designed which can achieve similar gains while reducing the computing complexity by 99%.