Utilization of an OLED-Based VLC System in Office, Corridor, and Semi-Open Corridor Environments

Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) have recently received growing interest for their merits as soft light and large panels at a low cost for the use in public places such as airports, shopping centers, offices, and train or bus stations. Moreover, the flexible substrate-based OLEDs provide an attractive feature of having curved or rolled lighting sources for the use in wearable devices and display panels. This technology can be implemented in visible light communications (VLC) for several applications such as visual display, data communications, and indoor localization. This article aims to investigate the use of flexible OLED-based VLC in indoor environments (i.e., office, corridor and semi-open corridor in shopping malls). We derive a two-term power series model to be match with the root-mean-square delay spread and optical path loss (OPL). We show that, for OLED positioned on outer-wall of shops, the channel gain is enhanced in contrast to them being positioned on the inner-wall. Moreover, the channel gain in empty environments is higher compare with the furnished rooms. We show that, the OPL for a 10 m link span are lower by 4.4 and 6.1 dB for the empty and semi-open corridors compared with the furnished rooms, when OLED is positioned on outer-wall of shops. Moreover, the channel gain in the corridor is higher compared with the semi-open corridor. We also show that, in furnished and semi-open corridors the OPL values are 55.6 and 57.2 dB at the center of corridor increasing to 87.6 and 90.7 dB at 20 m, respectively, when OLED is positioned on outer-wall of shops.