Performance Analysis of Multi-Hop V2V VLC System under Atmospheric Weather Conditions

The reliability of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) visible light communication (VLC) systems is affected by several environmental factors. These include the availability of the direct communication link, the transmit power budget, the required communication quality and speed, and the atmospheric weather conditions. This encourages the usage of multi-hop relay systems. In which, the intermediate vehicles operate as wireless relays, receiving the signal from the source vehicle, decoding it, and re-transmitting it to the next vehicle until it reaches the destination vehicle. In this paper, we analyze the performance of multi-hop V2V VLC systems through the derivation of the maximum achievable communication distance and utilizing a realistic ray tracing channel modeling approach. The effects of the transceiver, system parameters, and weather conditions on the V2V VLC system performance are also investigated. Our results demonstrate that the foggy weather with low visibility has a severe impact on the V2V system performance, the transmission range is reduced by about 40 m comparing to the clear weather assuming the single transmission link. The results further reveal that deploying the inter-mediate vehicles as multi-hop relays has the ability to extend the transmission ranges, i.e., for only one hop relay, the maximum distance climbs by more than 50 m in the worst weather case.