Comparison of LED illumination patterns for camera based car to car communications

Abstract

In this paper a comparison between a spiral and a strip shaped LED is presented in terms of the maximum link distance achievable in visible light based car to car communications (VLC-C2C). The transmitted data is recovered from the frame brightness of the video signal. The intensity modulated LED is captured from two scenarios, using a focused and unfocused camera. A data rate of 180 bps with the bit error rate performance below the FEC limit of 10-3 at a distance of 100 cm is successfully achieved, sufficient for transmitting road safety messages for VLC-C2C. It is shown that under the same conditions, the strip LED can effectively recover the data from a greater distance than its spiral counterpart.