The Impact of Blocking and Shadowing on the Indoor Visible Light Positioning System

This paper addresses the effects of blocking and shadowing due to peoples’ movement on the performance of visible light positioning system based on received signal strength. We consider both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight paths and using a non-sequential ray-tracing model, the channel is characterised with and without blocking and shadowing. A linear least square with a polynomial regression model is proposed for the position estimation. We show that, the VLP accuracy degrade by ~90 and ~67% due to blocking and shadowing, respectively. Besides, at a confidence interval of 90%, the positioning error e p of 1.47 m is recorded with human blockage as compared with 0.15 m for the non-blocking cases while shadowing introduces e p of 0.82 m compared with 0.27 m for the non-blocking case.