Propagation Measurements of Indoor Infrared Channels

K.Smithaa and J.John b a,b Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, INDIA 208016.
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we explain the experimental characterization of indoor infrared channels that use intensity modulation with direct detection. The measurement set up consists of an optical transmitter with an infrared LED and an optical receiver with a photodiode. The frequency response is plotted for different receiver locations without changing the transmitter location. From this we compute the channels impulse response. We have also experimentally verified that the channel magnitude response varies with receiver location. Keywords: Infrared, wireless communication, local area networks, optical wireless, transceivers.

1. INTRODUCTION
Non Directed Infrared Links are gaining popularity as high-speed wireless communication medium for indoor Local Area Networks. Advantages offered by infrared over radio include the availability of a virtually unlimited, unregulated bandwidth of 200 THz in the 700-1500nm range, high security due to the fact that infrared radiation does not pass through walls or other opaque barriers and high capacity per unit volume due to neighboring cells sharing the same frequency. Optical transceivers are small and relatively inexpensive. The infrared link in its simple form employs Intensity Modulation / Direct Detection with short carrier wavelength and large area detector leading to efficient spatial diversity and thus preventing multipath fading. Drawbacks of Infrared systems are the degradation of performance in presence of ambient light, high path loss especially in diffused infrared links and intersymbol interference due to multipath dispersion. Infrared link is mainly a power-limited link. Infrared transmission inside a room can be achieved in two ways: Line of Sight (LOS), which requires an unobstructed path between transmitter and receiver and Diffuse, which relies on reflections from a large diffuse reflector, say ceiling, henceforth avoiding the need for a LOS path. Advantages of the LOS configuration are high gain due to directional transmission, which results in higher data rates and low power requirements. But they are more susceptible to shadowing and have stringent alignment requirements. The diffuse configuration has no alignment restrictions and so is the best-suited one for mobile applications. Diffuse configuration has the disadvantage of higher power requirement and multipath dispersion caused by objects. In both LOS and diffuse links, there will be substantial variations of received power on a distance scale of the order of a wavelength just like a radio channel. But in IM/DD infrared systems, the square law detector being much larger than the wavelength, the variations are averaged out effectively resulting in the absence of multipath fading. Reliable communication can be made possible by the design of efficient transceivers, which in turn depends on the designers knowledge on the propagation properties at infrared frequencies. Any change in the position and/or orientation of transmitter and/or receiver changes the channel characteristic. Blockage and shadowing also will vary the properties of channel. There will be wide variation in the observed properties if the transmitter or receiver rotates. Effective design of an infrared wireless communication system requires channel measurements under different conditions and optical configurations. These measurements give an idea about the distortions and noises that are encountered in the actual application of these systems. Modeling and computer simulation of indoor infrared channel had been addressed in works of Gfeller et al.1 , Barry et al.2,6 Experimental works carried out by Hashemi et al.4,5, Krause et al.3measured infrared channel properties over high bandwidth and characterized the frequency response.

smitha@iitk.ac.in; phone 91 512 259 7733; fax 91 512 259 0063; iitk.ac.in

In this paper we characterize the optical channel using the frequency response and the impulse response derived from it. The experimental results show that the channel response magnitude varies with the position of the receiver. The structure of the paper is as follows. We discuss the properties of indoor infrared channels in Section 2. In section 3, our experimental set up and measurement procedure are explained. Results of the analysis are reported in Section 4, and concluding remarks in Section 5.

2. INDOOR INFRARED CHANNEL

Figure 1. Indoor Optical wireless system

In IM/DD mode of operation, the intensity or power of the optical source X(t) is directly modulated by varying the drive current. At the receiver, a photo detector is used to generate a photocurrent Y(t), which is proportional to the instantaneous optical power incident upon it. Fig.1 shows a typical indoor optical wireless communication system in its simple form. An optical wireless system using IM/DD has an equivalent baseband model, which hides the high-frequency nature of the optical carrier. It can be characterized using the equation: Y(t) =RX(t)*h(t) +N(t) (1) The received photocurrent Y(t) is the convolution of the transmitted optical power X(t) with the channel impulse response h(t), scaled by the photodetector responsivity, plus an additive noise N(t). R represents the photodetector responsivity. The impulse response depends on the configuration of transmitter, receiver and the reflectors in the environment. The noise is usually modeled as additive Gaussian and white. Although the above equation is simply a linear filter with additive noise, optical wireless systems differ from conventional radio systems since here X(t) represents power and not amplitude. So there are two constraints on the transmitted signal. 1) X(t)=0, i.e. X(t) must be non-negative 2) The average value of X(t) must not exceed a specified value Pmax, , which depends on eye-safety constraints. These differences have profound effect on system design. In optical wireless links, SNR is proportional to the square of the average received optical signal power. So high transmit powers are required and only limited path loss can be tolerated. SNR is also proportional to detector area. But as the detector area increases, its capacitance also increases which has a limiting effect on receiver bandwidth. So always a trade off exists between the SNR and bandwidth.

3. EXPERIMENTAL SET UP
The experiment aims at characterizing the frequency response of the indoor infrared channel that uses intensity modulation and direct detection of an infrared carrier. The channel is excited with tones of constant amplitude over a wide range of frequencies. The attenuation of each frequency component caused by the propagation medium is measured. The frequency response is obtained by varying the frequency of the signal at the transmitter under program control in pre-defined intervals. Thus the whole process of transmission of signal and received signal analysis, or in short the frequency response analysis of the optical channel, is automated. From the frequency response, the impulse response of the optical channel is calculated by taking the inverse Fourier transform. The experimental set up consists of a transmitter, a receiver and a prototype of a typical room (wooden model) with dimensions 50cm50cm 30cm. The modulating signal is obtained from a high frequency Signal generator (controlled by a PC through GPIB), which gives a constant amplitude sinusoidal signal, which is then converted to the optical domain using a transmitter. The transmitter has an infrared Light Emitting Diode and the necessary driver circuits. The electric signal from the signal generator directly modulates the intensity of the light emitted by the LED. The receiver consists of a photodiode and an amplifying stage for achieving good

signal to noise ratio of the measured signal. The received signal is viewed on a CRO connected to the controlling PC through GPIB. The experimental set up is shown in Fig.2. Tables 1 and 2 give the important measurement set up parameters and the position co-ordinates of the different frequency response measurement trials.

Figure 2. Block diagram of measurement setup

Operating Wavelength 850nm Frequency Range of 100 KHz-5 MHz Measurement Average Optical Output 2mW Power of IR LED Area of the Photodiode 5mm2 (Circular) Responsivity of 0.65A/W Photodiode Table 1. Measurement Setup Parameters

Transmitter Location Receiver Location(1) Receiver Location(2) Receiver Location(3)

(50,50,0) (25,25,15) (20,20,15) (10,10,15)

Table 2. Position co-ordinates (in cm) for different trials

4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The results are based on the frequency profiles collected in the wooden prototype of a room, with transmitter (Tx) remaining at the same position and changing the location of the receiver(Rx). For each location of the Rx, the corresponding frequency response of the Tx-Rx pair is plotted. The signal source and the CRO are connected to a Pentium III PC through GPIB and controlled usng LabVIEW software. Figures 3 to 5 represent the magnitude and impulse responses for three different locations of the receiver. The frequency plots show a peak response at 600-700 KHz range. For all the plots, this remains the same. But for different plots, the value of the peak is different. Depending on this, the maximum of the impulse response also changes. This clearly shows that the value of the response depends on the location of the receiver.

Figure 3(a) Frequency Response for Location 1

Figure 3(b) Impulse Response for Location 1

Figure 4(a) Frequency Response for Location 2

Figure 4(b) Impulse Response for Location 2

Figure 5(a) Frequency Response for Location 3

Figure 5(b) Impulse Response for Location 3

All measurements were taken in a dark environment so as to reduce the effect of ambient light. An attempt is made to avoid all the obstacles so that there are no significant shadowing and blockage effects. Shadowing and blockage increase the path loss and thus reduces the response magnitude. The details of channel responses depend on the particular link geometry. However, all responses exhibit a qualitative similarity. There is an initial peak in all impulse responses, which represents the line of sight and significant initial reflections. Later the response magnitude decreases due to the reduction in amplitude of power in the higher order reflections. The plots obtained agree with the trend in earlier works2,7,8..

4. CONCLUSION
Non-directed indoor IR channels using IM/DD can be characterized by its impulse response. We have experimentally characterized the frequency response of a diffuse channel. Results show that the magnitude response depends very much on the position of the receiver and the transmitter.

REFERENCES
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