Visible Light Communication-Enabled Simultaneous Position and Orientation Detection for Harnessing Multipath Interference and Random Fading

We focus on visible light communication-based simultaneous position and orientation detection (SPAO) for user devices (UDs) using photodiodes, which is challenging due to scattering interference and small-scale fading. To address this challenge, a novel SPAO approach is proposed, which can jointly estimate UD location parameters and scattering channel states. As such, the disturbance of diffuse scattering and random fading on SPAO will be alleviated via scattering channel equalization. In addition, SPAO is non-convex in nature, and hence brute-force application of conventional optimization methods will lead to a poor SPAO solution. To address this issue, we devise a majorization minimization (MM)-based SPAO algorithm, where hidden convex structure of the non-convex SPAO problem is exploited, which renders an efficient closed-form iteration rule for joint SPAO and diffuse channel estimation. Due to the cross-layer cooperation between “VLC” and “ranging”, a robust SPAO solution against diffuse scattering and small-scale fading is achieved. It is corroborated by our simulations that the proposed MM-based SPAO algorithm achieves a large performance gain over state-of-the-art baseline methods.