Performance Limits of Passive Visible Light Positioning Using Shadowing Effects

In this letter, we explore the performance limits of passive indoor positioning for an object using a single light emitting diode (LED) transmitter and multiple photodiode (PD) receivers mounted in the environment without prior knowledge of their orientations. A novel method is proposed to estimate the object location and multiple receiver orientations via the measuring received signal strength (RSS) changes of PDs causing by the shadowing effects of the object’s existence in a room. Based on the measurements, we derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the estimations of the object location and receiver orientations. The simulation results of the derived error bounds show that the theoretical lower bound accurately reflects the estimation performance of this passive positioning system.