Lightweight RSS-Based Visible Light Positioning Considering Dust Accumulation

The performance of received signal strength (RSS)-based visible light positioning (VLP) is heavily reliant on the pre-existing channel model which describes the RSS attenuation with distance. In indoor areas, dust particles accumulating on the surfaces of LEDs may cause the pre-existing channel model deviating from actual situations and consequently decrease the localization performance. In this paper, we first experimentally verify the impact of dust on the RSS VLP system performance and find that the positioning error is significantly increased even in slight dust deposition scenarios. Then we modify the classical Lambertian-based channel model to reflect the influence of dust, and propose a two-points approach which performs the channel model calibration only based on two RSS measurements. Additionally, the variations of the channel model parameters with the accumulation of dust are observed and mathematically modeled. A single-point approach is further designed which requires only one RSS measurement for each channel model calibration. The experimental results demonstrate that the average positioning error remains below 6 cm under different dust accumulation scenarios. The negative impact of dust can be effectively mitigated by our proposed RSS VLP scheme with low system maintenance cost. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first piece of work considering dust accumulation for VLP.