Vehicle-to-vehicle visible light communication: How to select receiver locations for optimal performance?

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) utilizes vehicle headlights as wireless transmitters and has emerged as a strong candidate for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. In majority of works on V2V VLC systems, a common underlying assumption is that two vehicles within the same lane follow each other in a perfect alignment. In practical scenarios, a precise alignment is not available between two vehicles even if they are in the same lane. In this paper, we consider a VLC-based V2V system where the destination vehicle is equipped with four photodetectors for an omni-directional coverage. We use ray tracing simulations for channel modelling and calculate the received power for practical cases with imperfect alignment between two vehicles. In addition, we investigate the performance for lane changes. Our simulation results provide insight into which photodetectors are essential for each scenario under consideration.