Hybrid RF-VLC Technology for V2X in Platooning Applications Under Different Weather Conditions

The platooning of autonomous vehicles on highways is an emerging concept attracting significant interest due to its potential to enhance highway safety by enabling vehicles to closely follow one another, reducing reaction times for accidents, cooperative adaptive cruise control, mitigating human errors, reducing fuel consumption, and improving traffic utility. This paper proposes the integration of vehicular visible light communication (VLC) or radio frequency (RF) based technology over infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication links to support desirable quality of service (QoS) requirements in vehicular platoon networks. We simulate possible integration architectures encompassing RFNLC-based I2V with the RFNLC-based V2V link. The proposed work also explores the benefits and trade-offs of integrating the RFNLC-based I2V with the RFNLC-based V2V, specifically for vehicular platoon networks. We evaluate and compare these proposed architectures in terms of data rate and bit-error-rate (BER) under varying weather conditions. The obtained simulation results demonstrate the potential of this proposed hybrid architecture for I2V and V2V links, which could leverage the strength of standalone RF and VLC technologies. The RF-based I2V and VLC-based V2V hybrid architecture emerge as a standout performer, excelling in terms of communication range and resilience to challenging channel conditions.