A Simplified System Model for Optical Camera Communication

Data rate and communication distance are two important criteria for measuring the performance of optical camera communication (OCC) systems. Intensive researches have been made to find possible solutions to improve these two performance indicators. However, most existing literature either provides solutions which closely related to the experimental parameters of their own designed OCC systems or provides models which are suitable for visible light communication (VLC) and cannot be directly used in OCC. Motivated by this, we propose a simplified system model for OCC in this paper. By jointly applying Lambertian model for the transmitter light-emitting diode (LED), channel direct current (DC) gain for free space channel, and mathematical descriptions for the imaging process of the camera receiver, the proposed model provides the relationship between the optical transmission power and the final pixel values on the image sensor. We specifically explore the parameters of the transmission distance and the exposure time based on the proposed model. Simulation results qualitatively and quantitatively explore the influences of these two parameters on the final pixel values. Our proposed model can provide guidance for the design of a generalized OCC system as well as the selection of demodulating threshold, thus it can help to realize a high-performance OCC system.