Access and resource reservation in vehicular Visible Light Communication networks

Recently, Visible Light Communication (VLC) has been proposed as a low-cost and low-complexity technology for vehicular communications. In this paper, we propose a vehicular network architecture that enables wireless Infrastructure-to-Vehicle (I2V) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication to provide value added services. The wireless communication technique chosen to enable the data transmission is VLC due to its numerous advantages. A tree-based network access scheme is developed, providing a rapid connection and allowing to maximize at a large extent the network coverage beyond the area uncovered by lighting gateways. In particular, we propose a QoS oriented VANET architecture, which is based on a distributed and real-time computation of QoS metrics for multimedia services. QoS parameters are computed by the RSU announcing the route, and then updated by each intermediate node part of the tree under construction. Furthermore, we present a codeword-based node architecture that allows the optical switching of traffic from a vehicle node to another. Moreover, each vehicle in the network is identified by a structured codeword which allow to obtain a virtual tree that is not physically established. Based on the obtained virtual tree, we develop a multicast routing protocol for VANET.