Shadowing Effects On Visible Light Communication Channels

It is well known that the effect of shadowing on a visible light communication (VLC) system is severe due to its line of sight propagation nature. Hence, shadowing can seriously impair the system performance In this paper, we propose a method to take advantage of the optical diffraction phenomenon to overcome shadowing by employing a receiver with a wide field-of-view (FOV). We have modelled the shadowing effect for visible light by a Bimodal Gaussian distribution and derived the probability of error for low, moderate and severe shadowing conditions. The Bimodal Gaussian distribution effectively represents separate propagation modes caused by different polarizations. This approach is useful in both indoor and outdoor environments.