An Investigation of the Diversity Performance of Vehicular Visible Light Communications System under Dirty Headlights, Mobility, Atmospheric Turbulence, and Different Weather Scenarios

Over the recent few years, different studies on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)-visible light communications (VLC) have been reported in the literature. However, the joint impact of practical challenges such as accumulation of dirt particles or other formations on the headlights, lateral movement (mobility) of the vehicle, atmospheric turbulence, and different weather scenarios on the diversity performance of the V2V-VLC system has not been investigated yet. It is worth mentioning that the term diversity corresponds to the reliability of the communication system. To this end, in this research, we first model a comprehensive V2V-VLC system under the practical challenges of an outdoor V2V-VLC scenario. Further, we analyze the impact of these practical challenges on the diversity performance of the proposed V2V-VLC system. It is observed from the numerical results that these practical constraints have a significant impact on the diversity performance of the proposed V2V-VLC system. We consider different performance metrics such as path loss, average bit error rate, and diversity order to quantify the impact of the considered practical challenges on the proposed V2V-VLC system.