Ray tracing enables new advantages and discoveries in vehicular visible-light communications.

Özyeğin University is a private, non-profit university in Istanbul founded in 2007. Along with ten other institutions and industrial companies, Özyeğin is a partner in the EU-funded VISION ITN project, based in Marseille, France. VISION—an acronym for "visible light-based interoperability and networking"—aims to train a new generation of early-stage researchers in the emerging area of visible light communication (VLC) and equip them with the latest research.

The main goal of the VISION's VLC research is to develop technical and practical insights into the use of light fidelity (Li-Fi), a VLC technology that offers an alternative to Wi-Fi by running wireless communications based on light-emitting diodes (LED) transmission. Channel modeling for a VLC system—especially in outdoor applications—must account for a wide variety of possible obstructions in order to provide meaningful input into a system design.

To account for these obstructions and deliver a viable design, the Özyeğin team used built-in Li-Fi channel activity modeling support and methodology in OpticStudio. This Zemax feature, based on powerful non-sequential ray tracing algorithms and analytics for visualizing channel impacts, equipped the team with credible support for moving forward on their Li-Fi system design with a high degree of confidence.

Using OpticStudio, the team tracked and predicted key channel modeling metrics for VLC, including channel impulse response, amplitude response, phase response, and channel path loss—all to hugely beneficial levels of simulation accuracy.

"When we compared the results from our as-built system to the OpticStudio model we used during design," said Hossien Eldeeb, a VISION ITN research engineer who helped lead the project, "we saw an outstanding match between the ray tracing approximations and the actual measurements that were produced by our vector network analyzer in Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute."

Read the full story to find out the 3-step channel modeling process Özyeğin University uses in Zemax for optical wireless communications design. And to learn more about OpticStudio, the industry standard for optical design software, try it for free!