AOA-based localization and tracking in multi-element VLC systems

Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging technology that is expected to be widely used for indoor wireless communications. Accurate localization of VLC equipment has a wide variety of applications in indoor scenarios, where GPS receivers do not work. This paper proposes a new and effective method for localization of VLC devices based solely on the connectivity information. Due to narrow field of view characteristics of connected LEDs, angle of arrival to an access point can be estimated accurately. Exploiting such features, a least square estimator is developed for location estimation, and a Kalman filter is utilized for improving the tracking performance of a mobile device. Simulation results show that average localization accuracies on the order 0.2 meters can be achieved in various different access point topologies.