Navigation, routing and geolocation through visible light communication

To support people’s wayfinding activities in crowded buildings this paper proposes a method able to generate landmark route and alert instructions using Visible Light Communication .The system is composed of several ceiling luminaries transmitters which send the map information, alerts and the path messages required to wayfinding. The system informs the users, in real time, not only of the best route to the desired destination, through a route without clusters of users, but also of crowded places. Data is encoded, modulated and converted into light signals. An architecture based on a mesh cellular hybrid structure was used. The luminaires are equipped with one of two types of nodes: a “mesh” controller that connects with other nodes in its vicinity and can forward messages to other devices in the mesh, acting like routers nodes in the network and a “mesh/cellular” hybrid controller, that is also equipped with a modem providing IP base connectivity to the central manager services. Each luminaire for downlink can forward messages to other devices or to the central manager services. Mobile optical receivers, collect the data, extracts theirs location to perform positioning and, concomitantly, the transmitted data from each transmitter. Uplink transmission is implemented and the best route to navigate through venue calculated. Buddy wayfinding services are also considered. The results show that the system makes possible not only the self-localization, but also to infer the travel direction and to interact with information received optimizing the route towards a static or dynamic destination.