Physical Layer Implementation of Standard Compliant Vehicular VLC

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) has recently gained popularity as a complementary technology to radio frequency (RF) based alternatives for vehicular communications as a low-cost, secure and RF interference free technology. In this paper, we propose IEEE 802.15.7 standard-compliant physical layer (PHY) implementation and experimental evaluation, using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) automotive light emitting diode (LED) fog light for the purpose of low-latency safety message dissemination. We first show that the standard is applicable to line of sight (LoS) vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) VLC. We then demonstrate that the proper selection of modulation coding schemes (MCS) plays an important role in order to minimize bit-error- rate (BER) for the reliable transmission with varying inter-vehicle distances. We also addressed the angular limitations of COTS automotive LED light for viable vehicular VLC.