A Novel Frequency Domain Visible Light Communication (VLC) Three-Dimensional Trilateration System for Localization in Underground Mining

Abstract

A new visible light communication (VLC) system is proposed for localization in underground mining. Existent systems, such as global positioning system (GPS) and systems based on mobile communication, are generally not useful in underground mining. The proposed system is based on a three-dimensional trilateration VLC localization scheme. This articles offers an evaluation of the proposed system in different evaluation scenarios in terms of the average localization error. The proposed algorithm localizes the source with an average localization estimation error of less than (16.4 cm), based on the source location. The average error is (3.5 cm) for subjects that are very close to the light-emitting-diode (LEDs).The obtained results show the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with traditional short range radio frequency technologies such as RFID, Wi-Fi and Zigbee, making it a feasible system for localizing objects in underground mining.