On the performance of MIMO OFDM-based intra-vehicular VLC networks

Abstract

Vehicular hotspots for on-board Internet access using Long Term Evolution (LTE) as the backhaul network has recently gained popularity. Currently, Wi-Fi is the most common technology to provide in-vehicle access, where data has been relayed through on board LTE receiver. Despite its wide acceptance, coexistence and contention based data rate limitations with Wi-Fi necessitates alternatives for in-vehicle data access schemes. This paper investigates the performance of hybrid LTE and visible light communication (VLC) networks using LTE as the backhaul and VLC as the on-board access network.Under the consideration of vehicle interior unique channel characteristics and light emitting diode (LED) deployment flexibility, best transmitter configuration using repetition coding (RC) and spatial multiplexing (SM) multiple input multiple output (MIMO)modes is determined. Proposed configurations based on direct current biased optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing(DCO-OFDM) are compared with respect to their bit-error-rate (BER) performances. Furthermore, the performance of intravehicular VLC networks for single and multi-user scenarios is investigated.