Visible light communication in vehicular ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Advances in auto-mobile industry and urbanization enable vehicles communicate with each other and link adjacent cities to form connected smart cities. As a result, vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have become one of the most relevant communication technologies that aim to reduce traffic congestion, traffic accidents, energy waste and pollution by providing data dissemination about events. However, VANET systems suffer from scarcity of radio frequency (RF) spectrum which pushes researchers to investigate alternative technologies such as visible light communication (VLC). On the other hand, vehicular VLC has drawbacks; sudden glare on drivers at night condition and angular limitation of headlight which are needed to be experimentally evaluated. In this paper, we first present latest concept of vehicular VLC and provide detailed explanation of VLC problems. We then demonstrate experimentally that VLC problems have crucial effect on data packet delivery ratio and received power strength.