A Study of Yearly Sunlight Variance Effect on Vehicular Visible Light Communication for Emergency Service Vehicles

This paper investigates the impact of sunlight radiation at different times of the year on the performance of vehicular visible light communication (VVLC) for an emergency service vehicle (ESV). The paper considers the worst-case scenario of the sunlight being directly incident onto the receiver. The sunlight incidence model takes into account the apparent solar time as well as the direct, reflected and diffuse sunlight radiation. The performance of the VVLC is evaluated for pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) scheme. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) and bit error rate (BER) is simulated using a transmitter located at the top of ESV and receiver on the tail light height of a vehicle in front of the ESV. The simulation observed that the worst link distance decreases by up to 5 m when the sun minimum irradiation varies to the maximum during the year. The worst link distance is obtained when using binary PAM scheme while better performance could be obtained using higher-order PAM schemes.