Angle Diversity for an Indoor Cellular Visible Light Communication System

In this paper, we investigate the benefits of an angle diversity receiver (ADR) in an indoor cellular optical wireless communications (OWC) network. As the ADR consists of multiple photodiodes (PDs), a proper signal combining scheme is essential to optimise the system performance. Therefore, three different combination schemes, the equal gain combining (EGC), the select best combining (SBC) and the maximum ratio combining (MRC), are investigated. The results indicate that the ADR significantly outperforms the single-PD receiver in terms of both signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and area spectral efficiency (ASE). In particular, the ADR implementing the MRC scheme achieves the best performance, where over 40 dB SINR improvement is attained compared to the single-PD receiver.