Experimental Investigation of Visible Light Communications Coverage in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Applications

Communication-based vehicle safety applications have the potential to take traffic safety to the next level. This type of application envisions that vehicles on the road exchange traffic safety relevant data in order to cooperate toward traffic accident prevention, improved traffic efficiency and better driving experience. In this context, this paper provides an analysis of the vehicle-to-vehicle coverage in a two-lane driving scenario for the visible light communication (VLC) technology. Thus, it provides the experimental evaluation of this coverage range using a VLC prototype based on standard LED vehicle rear lights. The experimental results demonstrate a communication range of at least 50 meters, with an initial 2-8 meters region not covered by the receiver's FOV, when the vehicles are on adjacent lanes. The analysis of bit error rate results shows that even with an adequate signal processing, the number of errors can increase by about two order of magnitude when the vehicles are located on neighboring lanes.