Motion Characterization for Vehicular Visible Light Communications

The increasing use of light emitting diodes (LED) and light receptors such as photodiodes and cameras in vehicles motivates the use of visible light communication (VLC) for inter-vehicular networking. However, the mobility of the vehicles presents a fundamental impediment for high throughput and link sustenance in vehicular VLC. While prior work has explored vehicular VLC system design, yet, there is no clear understanding on the amount of motion of vehicles in real world vehicular VLC use-case scenarios. To address this knowledge gap, in this paper, we present a mobility characterization study through extensive experiments in real world driving scenarios. We characterize motion using a constantly illuminated transmitter on a lead vehicle and a multi-camera setup on a following vehicle. The observations from our experiments reveal key insights on the degree of relative motion of a vehicle along its spatial axis and different vehicular motion behaviors. The motion characterization from this work lays a stepping stone to addressing mobility in vehicular VLC.