Impact of repeaters on the performance of indoor visible light communications

In this study, we examine the performance of fixed gain amplify-and-forward repeaters for visible light communication (VLC) systems. We present the wireless optical channel model for VLC with the repeater and we evaluate the bit-error-rate (BER) performance for pulse-position modulation over the multipath channel with additive white Gaussian noise. The results reveal that when a repeater is placed, both the BER and the illuminance performance can be improved at any location in a typical office space. The benefit of VLC repeaters is also discussed when the channel from the source to the destination is shadowed. It is found that when the channel is shadowed, the impact of repeaters on the communication reliability is more distinct.