Slow Beam Steering for Indoor Multi-User Visible Light Communications

Abstract: Visible light communications (VLC) is an emerging technology that enables broadband data rates using the visible spectrum. VLC beam steering has been studied in the literature to track mobile users and to improve coverage. However, in some scenarios, it may be needed to track and serve multiple users using a single beam, which has not been rigorously studied in the existing works to our best knowledge. In this paper, considering slow beam steering where beam directions are assumed to be fixed within a transmission frame, we find the optimum steering angles to simultaneously serve multiple users within the frame duration. This is achieved by solving a non-convex optimization problem using grid based search and majorization-minimization (MM) procedure. Additionally, we consider multiple steerable beams case with larger number of users in the network, and propose an algorithm to cluster users and serve each cluster with a separate beam. The simulation results show that clustering users can provide higher rates compared to serving each user with a separate beam, and two user clusters maximizes the sum rate in a crowded room setting.