Review
A Survey of Channel Modeling Techniques for Visible Light Communications

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2021.103206Get rights and content

Highlights

  • An Overview on VLC channel models: definition, architecture, and methods.

  • Classification of VLC channel models according to four environments (indoor, outdoor, underwater, and underground).

  • Synthesis and discussions including the most used approaches for each environment and the most evaluated metrics.

Abstract

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a subset of Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) originally based on Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) for data transmission in an imperceptible way to human vision. Thanks to its wide license-free bandwidth, high security, and its low cost, VLC becomes a revolutionary alternative to the Radio Frequency (RF) networks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of VLC channel modeling techniques. It describes the main VLC channel components. It gives different channel models in indoor, outdoor, underwater, and underground environments. It draws a synthesis comparing the algorithms proposed in each environment. Moreover, the paper gives concluding remarks and future research directions for VLC channel models.

Introduction

The rapid development of various multimedia applications, the growing demand for high Quality of Service (QoS), high data rates, larger bandwidths, and the emergence of fifth and sixth-generation (5G and 6G) wireless communication systems have attracted academics and researchers to explore new advanced access approaches, new network architectures, and new wireless communication technologies such as Optical Wireless Communications (OWCs).

OWC is a promising wireless technology that utilizes optical spectrum as the propagation communication media. It has attracted growing research interest in recent years due to its excellent features such as wide spectrum, electromagnetic interference-free, high security, high data rate, high energy efficiency, and low-cost (Arnon et al., 2012, Grobe et al., 2013, Kedar and Arnon, 2004). In OWC, three different optical bands are used as a propagation medium including infrared radiation (IR) (Eldeeb et al., 2019), ultraviolet (UV) (Lee et al., 2017), and visible light (VL) (Komine and Nakagawa, 2004).

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a particular category of OWC that utilizes Light Emitting Diodes as light sources for enabling communications, illuminations, and localization. VLC offers high QoS, large unregulated bandwidth, high data rate (i.e., up to few Gb/s Căilean and Dimian, 2017 and limited by the LED modulation bandwidth), low battery consumption, and low latency in wireless communications. It can be noted that higher VLC data rates can be further achieved by utilizing multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication techniques and/or by adopting the advanced multiple channel multiplexing techniques such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) as in Chun et al. (2016).

VLC can be used in indoor wireless communications (Younus et al., 2018, Chen et al., 2013, Eldeeb et al., 2020d, Zhang et al., 2021), intelligent transport systems (Kumar et al., 2011, Eldeeb et al., 2020g, Cailean et al., 2013), localization (Şahin et al., 2015, Moradzadeh et al., 2020, Chaabna et al., 2019, Mousa et al., 2018), smart cities (Ayub et al., 2013, Demir et al., 2020), underwater (Zhao et al., 2020), vehicular (Liu et al., 2011, Darlis et al., 2021), and underground communications (Iturralde et al., 2017). The growing interest of this technology has resulted in many research activities including surveys gathering different propositions (Karunatilaka et al., 2015, Sevincer et al., 2013, Pathak et al., 2015, Khan, 2017, Li et al., 2018, Vappangi and Mani, 2019, Obeed et al., 2019, Matheus et al., 2019a).

In this background, the optical channel is one of the critical aspects for the design of the VLC system. It has a significant impact on its performance. It mainly depends on the type of communication environment such as indoor, outdoor, underwater, and underground.

Indoor VLC systems are defined as optical communication within a limited space. They support both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) (Ghassemlooy et al., 2019, Haas et al., 2017, Eldeeb et al., 2018). In fact, several approaches have been proposed to model and characterize the indoor VLC channel, most of them are an extension of conventional indoor IR channel models (Rodríguez et al., 2013, Chowdhury et al., 2014, Grubor et al., 2008, Eldeeb et al., 2017a).

On the other hand, VLC can be also used for outdoor applications, one such promising approach is Vehicular VLC (VVLC). However, this type brings additional challenges due to the atmospheric conditions (Ghassemlooy et al., 2019). Therefore, several studies have been carried out in the literature in order to model the VVLC channel taking into account the LOS (Kumar et al., 2011, Akanegawa et al., 2001, Kitano et al., 2003, Kumar et al., 2009), and NLOS links (Lee et al., 2012b, Eldeeb et al., 2020c, Lee et al., 2012a).

Another potential application area of VLC is marine communication. This one has attracted increasing attention as an alternative to acoustic communication due to its features such as high bandwidth and low time latency (Jamali et al., 2018). Generally, light propagation in the marine medium is affected by absorption, scattering, and turbulence phenomena due to the optical properties of water and object (Illi et al., 2019). In the literature, several approaches have been proposed to analyze and model an underwater VLC channel.

Most recently, VLC has also been introduced for underground mines. This environment is considered as the most hazardous with a very complex structure (Yarkan et al., 2009) due to the presence of toxic gases, poisonous substances, and dust (Ranjan et al., 2019). There are some works reported in the literature that describe the underground VLC channel (Iturralde et al., 2017, Wang et al., 2017a, Wang et al., 2018, Zhai and Zhang, 2015, Farahneh et al., 2017, Játiva et al., 2020a, Mansour, 2020, Wu and Zhang, 2016, Játiva et al., 2019b, Krommenacker et al., 2016).

Some surveys on VLC channels field have been published in the past couple of years. Each of them brings a different contribution as it is shown in Table 1. In fact, Johnson et al. (2013) focused on the underwater environment, in which the different modeling approaches such as Beer–Lambert Law, Radiative Transfer Function, and Monte Carlo are briefly discussed. Zeng et al. (2016) presented a more general underwater survey, which is based on three aspects including Underwater Optical Wireless Communication (UOWC) channel modeling, modulation and coding technologies, and experimental UOWC prototypes. The VLC channel models in the indoor environment have been surveyed in Qiu et al., 2016, Ramirez-Aguilera et al., 2018 and Miramirkhani and Uysal (2020). Al-Kinani et al. (2018b) gathered a set of OWCs channel measurement campaigns and channel models. Despite that, to the best of our knowledge, no work evolves the four environments simultaneously, especially the outdoor one. Motivated by this vision, we propose in this paper an inclusive survey of the VLC channel models considering indoor, outdoor, underwater, and underground environments. It gathers state-of-the-art researches on different channel models. It draws a comparison between these models and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each environment modeling approach.

This article presents a comprehensive survey of VLC channel models considering different environments i.e., indoor, outdoor, underwater, and underground. The survey considers various well-regarded databases such as IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, OSA, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, IET, Hindawi, and others. Fig. 1 shows the number of related VLC channel models publications per publisher where IEEE is the one who published the most about VLC channel models. Fig. 2 presents the number of VLC channel models publications per year and per publisher. We can see that VLC channel models attracted a lot of interest over the last 5 years with a peak recorded in 2015. Fig. 3 represents the top 10 countries ranked by the number of VLC channel models publications where China and Turkey are the most active countries in this area ahead of England, Spain, Korea, Japan, USA, France, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. Finally, Fig. 4 shows the tag cloud of the works we have summarized, reviewed, and analyzed in this paper.

The remainder of this survey is organized as follows. Initially, we present a fundamental introduction to the area along with a description of our research methodology. In Section 3, we define the VLC system with its different components. In Section 4, we discuss the theoretical foundations of the VLC channel. Section 5 introduces the state-of-the-art of different channel models in indoor, outdoor, underwater, and underground environments. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Research methodology

In the process of the literature survey on VLC channel modeling techniques under different environments (indoor, outdoor, underwater, and underground), we adopt the systematic literature review methodology (Masdari, 2017). Firstly, we start by looking for research papers providing a survey or a review on this area. In order to find an initial list of target review articles, we use Google Scholar by employing the following search strings:

  • Visible light communication channel models survey;

  • Visible

Architecture of visible light communication system

The architecture of the end-to-end VLC transmission system is illustrated in Fig. 5. It consists of three main parts which are the transmitter (TX) front-end, the receiver (RX) front-end, and the propagation VLC channel. The characteristics of these parts have a significant impact on the VLC system. In the following, we explain each individual part highlighting its inherent components and main functions.

Theoretical foundations of VLC channels

To evaluate the performance of VLC systems, VLC channel modeling is an essential task. The basic VLC channel can be modeled as a base-band Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) system (Higgins et al., 2009) with a non-negative impulse response h(t)>0 as shown in Fig. 6.

It is expressed as follows: (Ghassemlooy et al., 2019, Kahn and Barry, 1997) Y(t)=RX(t)h(t)+N(t).where Y(t) is the electrical received signal, R is the PD responsivity in (A/W), X(t) is the input optical power which cannot be negative (x(t

State-of-the-art

In this section, we present a leading research review related to VLC channel modeling techniques and their characteristics. The majority of them follow the methodology described in Fig. 7. A classification based on their specific environment including indoor, outdoor, underwater, and underground environments is detailed according to the distribution shown in Fig. 8. The percentage of the most used VLC channel models according to different environments is given in Fig. 9. As it is shown in this

Conclusion

Reliable knowledge of the communication channel is the foundation of the design and development of VLC systems. In this regard, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of VLC systems in terms of channel models under different environments. We discuss the main optical channel characteristics affecting the VLC link. Afterward, we classify the different VLC channel models according to a wide range of communication environments including indoor, outdoor, underwater, and underground. Furthermore,

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Selma Yahia is a Ph.D. student in LIST Laboratory at University of MHamed Bougara Boumerdes, Algeria. She has an Master degree in Networks and Telecommunications from the University of 08 Mai 1945 Guelma, Algeria in 2019. Her main current interests include visible light communication, optical wireless communication, and optical communication.

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  • Cited by (0)

    Selma Yahia is a Ph.D. student in LIST Laboratory at University of MHamed Bougara Boumerdes, Algeria. She has an Master degree in Networks and Telecommunications from the University of 08 Mai 1945 Guelma, Algeria in 2019. Her main current interests include visible light communication, optical wireless communication, and optical communication.

    Yassine Meraihi received his Ph.D. from the University of MHamed Bougara Boumerdes, Algeria in 2017. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Boumerdes, Algeria. His research interests include QoS for wireless networks, routing in challenged networks including WMSNs/VANETs, and applications of meta-heuristics to optimization problems.

    Amar Ramdane-Cherif received his Ph.D. degree from Pierre and Marie University of Paris in 1998. He is currently Since 2000, he is currently a Professor at the University of Versailles, SaintQuentin en Yvelines, France. His research interests include Software architecture, dynamic architecture, architectural quality attributes, architectural styles and design patterns.

    Asma Benmessaoud Gabis received her Master’s degree from Ecole nationale Supérieure d’informatique of Algiers (Algeria) in 2010. She is currently a Ph.D. student in LMCS at Ecole nationale Supérieure d’informatique of Algiers (Algeria). Her research interests include network design and communication, application of AI, machine learning and meta-heuristics for multi-objective optimization and performance evaluation.

    Dalila Acheli received her Ph.D. degree from the university of technology of Compiégne, France in 1997 in control of systems. She is currently a Professor at the University of MHamed Bougara Boumerdes, Algeria. Her research interests include Inverse problems, dynamic architecture, evolutionary computation and meta-heuristics.

    Hongyu Guan received his Ph.D. from the University of Bordeaux I, Bordeaux (France) in 2012 in computer science. He is now Research associate and chief project at the LISV laboratory, University of Versailles. His research interests include Visible Light Communications, ubiquitous, data fusion, sensors and nanometrology.

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