Mitigation of Strong Background Radiation with Attenuation Diversity for Vehicular Visible Light Communication

Abstract

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFD-M)based outdoor visible light communication (VLC)technology has a broad prospect in the future intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), but it's prone to the problem of receiving signal saturation distortion. So we proposed a receiver architecture with an adjustable attenuator to mitigate the saturation distortion caused by strong solar irradiance in a commercial avalanche photodiode (APD)module. The simulation results show that the proposed receiver architecture has a good performance in the outdoor VLC system for both asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM)modulation and direct current-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM)modulation. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has excellent performance in practical systems while utilizing DCO-OFDM modulation, and the bit error rate (BER)is reduced from 0.3 to 10−3under strong background light interference, which verified the feasibility of our proposed receiver architecture.