Performance Enhancement of Vehicular VLC Using Spherical Detector and Efficient Lens Design

The reliability of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) Visible Light Communication (VLC) systems is affected by several factors, such as car mobility and optics system design. Therefore, this paper focuses on the cars’ relative positions and the design of the optics on the receiving end. Instead of using the rectangle detector, commonly used in the literature, this paper proposes using the polar detector for V2V-VLC systems. We introduce using an imaging receiver with different kinds of optical lenses, such as Fresnel and Aspherical lenses to improve the performance of a V2V-VLC system. We perform a channel modeling study using the non-sequential ray-tracing approach, considering the possibility of horizontal and vertical movement between vehicles. A comprehensive performance comparison of these lenses assumes different vehicle positions on the road. We further investigate the impact of receiver type and lateral shift on the performance of the considered systems. The obtained results demonstrated that with a carefully chosen system and lens parameters, an enhancement of up to 7 dB in total received power could be achieved compared to the case without the lens.