Experimental Investigation of Lens Combinations on the Performance of Vehicular VLC

With the increasing adoption of LEDs in outdoor light sources such as traffic lights, street lights and vehicle headlamps, visible light communication (VLC) has the promise to become a major enabler for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the effect of using different lens combinations on vehicular VLC systems in outdoor environments. First, we measure the effective channel coefficient which includes the effect of both front-ends and propagation channel. Then, based on the estimated channel coefficients, we characterize the vehicular system performance in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and quantify improvements from utilizing different lens combinations.