A novel approach for optical RIS aided VLC communication in 5G IoT networks

With the emergence of Internet-of-things (IoT) enabled consumer applications, there is widespread augmentation of IoT devices, smart wearables and smart consumer electronics. Owing to the limited capabilities of 5G sub 6GHz technology and millimeter wave (mmWave) technology, optical wireless communication (OWC) is widely adopted in the IoT networks for high data rates and high bandwidth applications. This paper presents a visible light communication (VLC) 5G IoT network that uses VLC transmitters to serve the network IoT nodes fitted with photodiodes (PDs). An optical reconfigurable intelligent surface (ORIS) is used to overcome the line-of-sight (LoS) signal obstructions through controlled reflection. The performance of the VLC network is investigated for achievable sum rate under different ORIS elements and different optical transmit powers. It is observed that 90% of the user nodes in the network achieve higher sum rate with increased N. Further, the effect of ORIS phase shift is evaluated. In the end, the performance comparison of different VLC communication setups is also investigated.