In the context of an increasing interest toward reducing the number of traffic accidents and of associated victims, communication-based vehicle safety applications have emerged as one of the best solutions to enhance road safety. In this area, visible light communications (VLC) have a great potential for applications due to their relatively simple design for basic functioning, efficiency, and large geographical distribution. This paper addresses the issues related to the VLC usage in vehicular communication applications, being the first extensive survey dedicated to this topic. Although VLC has been the focus of an intensive research during the last few years, the technology is still in its infancy and requires continuous efforts to overcome the current challenges, especially in outdoor applications, such as the automotive communications. This paper is aimed at providing an overview of several research directions that could transform VLC into a reliable component of the transportation infrastructure. The main challenges are identified and the status of the accomplishments in each direction is presented, helping one to understand what has been done, where the technology stands and what is still missing. The challenges for VLC usage in vehicle applications addressed by this survey are: 1) increasing the robustness to noise; 2) increasing the communication range; 3) enhancing mobility; 4) performing distance measurements and visible light positioning; 5) increasing data rate; 6) developing parallel VLC; and 7) developing heterogeneous dedicated short range communications and VLC networks. Addressing and solving these challenges lead to the perspective of fully demonstrating the high potential of VLC, and therefore, to enable the VLC usage in road safety applications. This paper also proposes several future research directions for the automotive VLC applications and offers a brief review on the associated standardization activities.

In the context in which severe visual impairment significantly affects human life, this article emphasizes the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Visible Light Communications (VLC) in developing future assistive technologies. Toward this path, the article summarizes the features of some commercial assistance solutions, and debates the characteristics of VLC and AI, emphasizing their compatibility with blind individuals’ needs. Additionally, this work highlights the AI potential in the efficient early detection of eye diseases. This article also reviews the existing work oriented toward VLC integration in blind persons’ assistive applications, showing the existing progress and emphasizing the high potential associated with VLC use. In the end, this work provides a roadmap toward the development of an integrated AI-based VLC assistance solution for visually impaired people, pointing out the high potential and some of the steps to follow. As far as we know, this is the first comprehensive work which focuses on the integration of AI and VLC technologies in visually impaired persons’ assistance domain.

This paper presents an easy-to-use sensor aimed for traffic safety applications using visible light communications. A central problem in this area is the design of a suitable sensor able to enhance the conditioning of the signal and to avoid disturbances due to the environmental conditions. The visible light communication sensor proposed in this paper addresses these issues and enables a robust communication for short to medium distances. The presentation is focused on hardware aspects and low-level coding techniques. The experimental validation of the proposed sensor has been conducted by analyzing communication performances between a commercial traffic light and the sensor, for distances up to 50 m. The measurements exhibit bit error ratio lower than $10^{-7}$ in an outdoor configuration , using two well-known codes (Manchester and Miller) without any error-correcting codes or complex signal processing. The prototype is aimed for automotive applications but other outdoor configurations can also be addressed by slight changes in the system design.

Since more and more vehicles are using the transportation infrastructure, the safety and the efficiency of roads are of absolute importance. A solution to enhance the security of road transportation is by enabling wireless communications between vehicles and also with the traffic infrastructures (e.g., traffic lights, street lighting, or traffic signs). In this area, visible light communications (VLC) is considered of great perspective. A fundamental problematic in vehicular VLC is the design of a proper sensor capable to support long distance communications in dynamic traffic situations and in unfriendly atmospheric conditions. Therefore, this paper is focused on the design of the VLC sensors intended for vehicular communication applications, offering a review of the solutions found to mitigate the effect of the problematic conditions. Furthermore, this paper summarizes these solutions and proposes an environmental adaptive VLC receiver that would be capable to optimally adjust its settings in order to maximize the communication efficiency, but without affecting the communication robustness to noise.

The use of visible light communications technology in communication-based vehicle applications is gaining more and more interest as the research community is constantly overcoming challenge after challenge. In this context, this article addresses the issues associated with the use of Visible Light Communications (VLC) technology in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, while focusing on two crucial issues. On the one hand, it aims to investigate the achievable communication distance in V2V applications while addressing the least favorable case, namely the one when a standard vehicle rear lighting system is used as a VLC emitter. On the other hand, this article investigates another highly unfavorable use case scenario, i.e., the case when two vehicles are located on adjacent lanes, rather than on the same lane. In order to evaluate the compatibility of the VLC technology with the usage in inter-vehicle communication, a VLC prototype is intensively evaluated in outdoor conditions. The experimental results show a record V2V VLC distance of 75 m, while providing a Bit Error Ratio (BER) of 10⁻⁷–10⁻⁶. The results also show that the VLC technology is able to provide V2V connectivity even in a situation where the vehicles are located on adjacent lanes, without a major impact on the link performances. Nevertheless, this situation generates an initial no-coverage zone, which is determined by the VLC receiver reception angle, whereas in some cases, vehicle misalignment can generate a BER increase that can go up to two orders of magnitude.

The use of Visible Light Communications (VLC) in vehicular applications has become a major research area due to its simplicity, high performance to cost ratio, and great deployment potential. In this context, this article provides one of the very few analyses and experimental evaluations concerning the integration of a light dimming function in vehicular VLC systems. For this purpose, a vehicle-to-vehicle VLC prototype has been implemented and used to evaluate the systems’ communication performances in light dimming conditions, while decreasing the duty cycle from 40% to 1%, and increasing the communication range from 1 to 40–50 m. The experimental results showed that in normal lighting conditions, the VLC technology can easily support low duty cycle light dimming for ranges up to 40 m, while maintaining a 10⁻⁶ BER. Nevertheless, in strong optical noise conditions, when the system reaches its SNR limit, the communication range can decrease by half, whereas the BER can increase by 2–4 orders of magnitude. This article provides consistent evidence concerning the high potential of the VLC technology to support inter-vehicle communication links, even in light dimming conditions.