Evaluation of Misalignment Effect in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Visible Light Communications: Experimental Demonstration of a 75 Meters Link

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.