Measurement-based Analysis of Atmospheric Attenuation by Considering Different Weather Types for Visible Light Communications

Abstract

Facing the current shortage of radio frequency spectrum resources, visible light communications (VLC) technology has been proposed to be a candidate technology in the sixth generation (6G), especially in the application of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). And the propagation characteristics of VLC channel are critical for VLC system design and optimization. Furthermore, the impact of weather conditions on VLC channel cannot be ignored considering the vehicular VLC in ITS. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the impact of different weather types including fog and relative humidity (RH) on VLC in a laboratory atmospheric chamber. To simulate adverse weather conditions, we change the levels of fog density and water vapor introduced into the chamber, respectively. Then we measure the power attenuation and the bit error rate (BER) performance of VLC system under fog and RH conditions. We find that the VLC system will exhibit worse BER performance in the fog impaired channel than RH conditions. Besides, the results show that the bit errors will not happen until the attenuation reaches the threshold, i.e. attenuated by about 60% for both fog and RH conditions in our experiments. After that, the BER will deteriorate badly even up to 20%.