HY-PC: Enabling consistent positioning and communication using visible light

Visible light (VL) plays an important role in achieving high-precision positioning and low bit error radio (BER) data communication. However, most VL-based systems can not achieve positioning and communication, simultaneously. There are two problems: 1) the hybrid systems are difficult to extract distinguishable positioning beacon features without affecting communication performance, 2) in the hybrid systems, the lost data bits in the inter-frame gap (IFG) are hard to recover, which affects positioning and communication performance. Therefore, in this article, we propose a novel VL-based hybrid positioning and communication system, named HY-PC system, to solve the above problems. First, we propose the robust T-W mapping for recognizing specific Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), which can provide stable LED recognition accuracy without adding extra beacon data and does not decrease the communication rate. Furthermore, we also propose the novel linear block coding and bit interleaving mechanism, which can recover the lost data bits in the IFG and improve data communication performance. Finally, we use commercial off-the-shelf devices to implement our HY-PC system, extensive experimental results show that our HY-PC system can achieve consistent high-precision positioning and low-BER data communication, simultaneously.