Experimental Evaluation of Intelligent Transport System with VLC Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

Visible light communication (VLC) is suitable and natural candidate for vehicular communication. This paper presents the vehicle to vehicle communication system based on VLC technology utilizing light emitting diodes (LEDs) as a transmitter and photodiode as a receiver. The LEDs are present everywhere in outdoor and vehicles utilizing those for communication. Vehicular ad hoc networks are facilitated by empowering enormous applications to require both proficient and reliable data delivery. Low-latency, simple and cost-effective system is designed with less complexity and high consistency by employing off-the-shelf LEDs and photodiodes which mitigates the implementation of complex protocols of typical wireless communication systems. The signal is transmitted from one vehicle that will be received by another vehicle to make sensible steps and to maintain strategic distance to avoid accidents. In this paper, the performance analysis of VLC based vehicle to vehicle communication (V2V) is presented. The results show that 3.5 Mbps and 500 kbps of data rates have been achieved over the distance of 0.5 and 15 m respectively. Amplitude shift keying, frequency shift keying (FSK) and phase shift keying schemes are tested with non-return-zero coding scheme. Bit error rate, received optical power and received signal voltages are measured and analyzed in this paper for V2V communication. The FSK modulation is an efficient technique for long distance as it has lower losses compared to other techniques. Warning messages are displayed on liquid crystal display. The prototype is evaluated experimentally over the distance of 15 m using an array of LEDs to reduce the chances of accidents. Bit error rate of 10−11 for FSK modulation has been achieved with the signal to noise ratio value of 13 dB in this work. The results confirmed the performance of the proposed system and presented that VLC is a feasible technology for vehicular communication.