VehicleTalk: Lightweight V2V Network Enabled by Optical Wireless Communication and Sensing

Platooning has been proven to dramatically increase traffic flow and reduce fuel consumption, and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication and sensing are requisite for platooning stability. However, most of the existing works only address V2V communication or sensing functions respectively, which is far away from meeting the 6G requirements in availability and synchronization for platooning applications. Inspired by the recent advanced integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in this paper, we propose VehicleTalk, a lightweight V2V communication and sensing framework. Essentially, VehicleTalk reuses the head/tail LED lights of the vehicles to construct communication/sensing channels for achieving concurrent message exchange and status awareness between adjacent vehicles. In particular, VehicleTalk innovates in both message transmission and vehicle sensing to improve communication robustness and lower system latency for platooning. It leverages Raptor Codes to combat serious packet loss in the V2V network. We also engineer a fast risk detection algorithm by simply monitoring the strength change of the received optical signals from the head/tail lights to improve safety in extreme cases such as emergency brake and cutting-in. Finally, we build a prototype of VehicleTalk with low-cost Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices to quickly verify its effectiveness, and the extensive experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of VehicleTalk.