Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Indoor Visible Light Communication Systems

This letter explores the use of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) to address the line-of-sight (LoS) blockage issue in an indoor visible light communication (VLC) system. This is done while considering practical user behaviors such as random receiver orientation and the presence of obstructions in the direct link between the transmitter and the receiver. Specifically, a system model for an IRS-aided VLC system is proposed and a rate maximization problem is considered to determine the optimal orientation of the IRS mirror array to establish robust non-LoS links. A low-complexity iterative solution based on the sine-cosine algorithm is proposed for this non-convex optimization problem. Simulation results are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed IRS-aided VLC system design and optimization algorithm in overcoming the LoS blockage issue.