Location-Aware Adaptive Physical Layer Design for Vehicular Visible Light Communication

Vehicular visible light communication (V2LC) is expected to complement radio frequency (RF) technologies for higher reliability in vehicular connectivity. Since high mobility makes the line-of-sight V2LC channel very dynamic, an adaptive physical layer (PHY) design is required for realizing a rate-optimal and reliable V2LC system. Existing studies on adaptive PHY designs have mostly considered indoor scenarios with low mobility and require a feedback channel for both reporting the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to the transmitter and channel equalization (CE), which increases system complexity and introduces overhead. This paper presents a novel low-complexity adaptive PHY design that provides rate-optimal and reliable V2LC without a feedback channel. The proposed design utilizes a priori measurements of the BER with respect to SNR, which are static for V2LC on the road. SNR is predicted in real-time based on the relative locations of the transmitting (TX) and receiving (RX) vehicles using a path loss model based on a priori measurements of the SNR-distance relationship and the polar beam pattern for a given TX/RX pair, in a given setting. The proposed design is validated via night-time experiments with On-Off-Keying (OOK), 4-Pulse-Position Modulation (4-PPM) and Direct Current-Biased Optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM). The proposed location-aware adaptive PHY design can be expanded for general reliable rate-optimal V2LC use by updating the path loss model with additional measurements for different settings.