Robust joint optical delay and received signal strength positioning for visible light communication systems using particle swarm optimization
摘要
Accurate indoor positioning in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)-denied environments remains a critical challenge for next-generation intelligent spaces, industrial automation, and context-aware services. Visible light communication (VLC) and visible light positioning (VLP) have emerged as attractive solutions due to their dual functionality of illumination and communication, immunity to electromagnetic interference, and potential for high-accuracy localization. However, practical VLC/VLP systems are highly sensitive to receiver orientation, LED/front-end nonlinearities, ambient light, multipath reflections, and hardware-related timing offsets and RSS measurement distortions. In this paper, we propose a robust joint optical delay–received signal strength (RSS) positioning framework for VLC systems, where delay-derived pseudorange information and received optical power measurements are fused under a unified weighted negative log-likelihood formulation. Unlike conventional VLP schemes that rely on either RSS-only or pseudorange-only inference under Gaussian assumptions, the proposed approach explicitly accounts for non-Gaussian measurement distortions and per-link timing bias in the optical domain. The user position and per-link timing-bias parameters are jointly estimated through particle swarm optimization (PSO), enabling robust operation in highly nonlinear and multimodal VLC localization landscapes. In the evaluated LOS-dominant scenario, the proposed joint optical delay–RSS estimator achieves an RMSE of