—Mobile optical wireless has so far been limited to very short ranges for high data rate systems. It may be feasible to overcome the data rate limitations over large transmission range in optical wireless through camera receivers and light emitting transmitter arrays through a concept what we call ”visual MIMO”. In this concept multiple transmit elements of a light emitting array (LEA) are used as transmitters to communicate to the individual pixel elements of the camera which act as multiple receive elements to create the visual MIMO channel. Multiplexing information over parallel data channels albeit be very similar to RF MIMO in concept, the visual MIMO approach dramatically differs in its characterization. In visual MIMO since the received signal is essentially the image of the transmitting element, the perspective distortions in the visual channel dominate over some of the important properties of a RF wireless channel such as distance based attenuation and multipath fading. ...
Ashwin Ashok, Marco Gruteser, Narayan B. Mandayam,