The multi-element visible light communications (VLC) networks can offer increased aggregate throughput via simultaneous wireless links and attain higher spatial reuse. The downlink data transmission efficiency can be significantly improved by using multi-element VLC modules due to its light beam directionality where each transmitter can be modulated with different data streams.

Despite the spatial reuse advantages of multi-element multi-stream VLC architecture, it introduces two new problems: (1) lighting uniformity and (2) LED-to-mobile association. The spatial reuse advantages are exclusively dependent on making the LEDs’ divergence angles narrower (in contrast to diffuse optics), which makes the lighting spotty and limits the mobility of receiver to a smaller area. Placement and transmit powers of LEDs can be tuned to solve the former, and on-the-fly association of LEDs to mobile receivers can be made to handle the latter.

The goal of the proposed research efforts is investigation of the methods and parameters for joint design of illumination and communication metrics in physical and protocol layers, and ultimately, to demonstrate a prototype with the

optimized design. The need for coining the new solution as opposed to the more conventional term of VLC is not an effort to sound original but stems from our focus on both illumination and communication aspects concurrently. Such a joint design requires extensive exploration of design space with many conflicting trends, and hence, tradeoffs.