Indoor localization using visible light and accelerometer

Indoor positioning has attracted a lot of attention in the literature. Positioning systems using the existing wireless network have low deployment cost but the position error can be up to several meters. Some proposed systems have low position error; however, they require extra hardware, thereby resulting in high deployment costs. In this work, we propose a positioning system that offers low position error at a low deployment cost. The proposed system uses visible light communications (VLC) together with the accelerometers in mobile devices. In contrast to existing works on VLC for positioning, our system neither requires the knowledge of the height of the receiver from the ground, nor does it require the receiver to be oriented such that the angle of irradiance of a transmitter equals the incidence angle at the receiver. The proposed system has low complexity, and simulation results show that it achieves position errors of less than 0.5 meter.