Performance investigation of streetlight-to-vehicle visible light communication

Abstract

This paper investigates streetlight-to-vehicle visible light communication (VLC) system performance for outdoor broadcasting applications. We adopt streetlight lamps as optical internet-of-thing (IoT) devices broadcasting internet services and safety messages to road vehicles. With their asymmetrical radiation patterns, Streetlight antennas are exceedingly different from indoor lighting modules, which deploy ceiling luminaries with ideal Lambertian ones. Therefore, a realistic channel modelling for streetlight-to-vehicle VLC system should be deployed for precise performance insights. We consider a streetlight-to-vehicle VLC system in a two-lane road with multiple light poles uniformly distributed on both sides. Based on that, we investigate the system performance of the streetlight-to-vehicle VLC system in terms of the bit-error-rate (BER) and outage distance and explore the effect of different transceivers and system parameters on the performance. These consider the transmission modulation order, receiver size, height of the streetlight poles, and their corresponding intermediate distances.