Optimal Mirror Placement to Minimize the Outage Area in Visible Light Communication.

Visible light communication (VLC) is a growing technology that can complement radio frequency to fulfill the increasing demand for wireless data services. VLC exploits the already deployed illumination infrastructure based on light-emitting diodes to communicate data. While mirrors have been traditionally used for interior decoration, among other applications, to what extent can they be deployed to improve VLC performance? In this paper, we propose optimizing the placement of mirrors to minimize the outage area, a common problem in VLC when line-of-sight link blockage occurs. We compare this optimal performance with a single-rectangular mirror array, a common mirror shape that is found indoors. We also study the most helpful mirror placement under different conditions. We show that our outage minimization algorithm, MinOut, easily provides threefold outage reductions. Besides, we demonstrate that a single-rectangular mirror array with orientation mobility can provide similar or even better performance than an optimal distributed mirror placement without mobility.