In this letter, we investigate the performance of vehicular visible light communications based on the radiation patterns of different commercial taillights (TLs) using non-sequential ray tracing simulations. Our simulation results indicate a significant variation in the path loss compared with Lambertian model. Based on the ray tracing results, we propose a new path loss model as a function of the propagation distance considering the asymmetrical radiation pattern of TLs. We use this model to derive the attainable transmission distance. We further present the delay spread for various vehicular communication scenarios to demonstrate the effect of neighboring vehicles.

Optical camera communications (OCC) research field has grown recently, aided by ubiquitous digital cameras; however, atmospheric conditions can restrict their feasibility in outdoor scenarios. In this work, we studied an experimental OCC system under environmental phenomena emulated in a laboratory chamber. We found that the heat-induced turbulence does not affect our system significantly, while the attenuation caused by fog does decrease the signal quality. For this reason, a novel strategy is proposed, using the camera’s built-in amplifier to overcome the optical power loss and to decrease the quantization noise induced by the analog-digital converter of the camera. The signal quality has been evaluated using the Pearson’s correlation coefficient with respect to a reference template signal, along with the signal-to-noise ratio that has been empirically evaluated. The amplification mechanism introduced allows our system to receive the OCC signal under heavy fog by gradually increasing the camera gain up to 16 dB, for meteorological visibility values down to 10 m, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9 with respect to clear conditions.

Intelligent transport systems (ITS) rely upon the connectivity, cooperation and automation of vehicles aimed at the improvement of safety and efficiency of the transport system. Connectivity, which is a key component for the practical implementation of vehicular light communications (VeLC) systems in ITS, must be carefully studied prior to design and implementation. In this paper, we carry out a performance evaluation study on the use of different vehicle taillights (TLs) as the transmitters in a VeLC system. We show that, the transmission coverage field of view and the link span depend on TLs illumination patterns and the transmit power levels, respectively, which fail to meet the typical communication distances in vehicular environments. This paper proposes an infrared-based VeLC system to meet the transmission range in daytimes under Sunlight noise. We show that, at the forward error correction bit error rate limit of 3.8 ×10 ^-3 , the communication distances of the proposed link are 63, 72, and > 89 m compared with 4.5, 5.4 and 6.3 m for BMW's vehicle TL at data rates of 10, 6, and 2 Mbps, respectively.

Visible light communications (VLC) has been introduced as a complementary wireless technology that can be widely used in industrial indoor environments where automated guided vehicles aim to ease and accelerate logistics. Despite its advantages, there is one significant drawback of using an indoor vehicular VLC (V-VLC) network that is there is a high handover outage duration. In line-of-sight VLC links, such handovers are frequently due to mobility, shadowing, and obstacles. In this paper, we propose a frequency diversity and link aggregation solution, which is a novel technique in Data link layer to tackle handover challenge in indoor V-VLC networks. We have developed a small-scale prototype and experimentally evaluated its performance for a variety of scenarios and compared the results with other handover techniques. We also assessed the configuration options in more detail, in particular focusing on different network traffic types and various address resolution protocol intervals. The measurement results demonstrate the advantages of our approach for low-outage duration handovers in V-VLC. The proposed idea is able to decrease the handover outage duration in a two-dimensional network to about 0.2 s, which is considerably lower compared to previous solutions.

This letter investigates a vehicle-to-vehicle relay-assisted visible light communications link with amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying schemes and analyze the effect of the relay vehicle's orientation with respect to the source vehicle. Results show up to 150 % increase in the link span under emulated sunlight for the DF relay link compared with AF at the end of the second hop using the same system parameters at the forward error correction bit error rate limit of 3.8×10 ^-3 . A method to mitigate the effect of system performance degradation due to misalignment between communicating vehicles is also proposed.