Broadcasting brake lights with MIMO-OFDM based vehicular VLC

Inter-vehicular connectivity to enhance road safety and enable highly autonomous driving is increasingly becoming popular. Despite the prevalent works on radio-frequency (RF) based vehicular communication schemes, visible light communication (VLC) is considered to be a promising candidate for vehicular communications due to its low complexity and RF interference-free nature. This paper investigates applicability of VLC to enhance road safety based on real world measurements. Deployment of multiple light emitting diodes (LEDs) enables multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission in the context of vehicular VLC. We consider direct current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) based MIMO transmission scheme and evaluate the performances of different MIMO modes including repetition code (RC) and spatial multiplexing (SM), different modulation orders and different transmitter-receiver selection. The results reveal that selection of the closest transmitters to the receivers, provide better performance due to high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) requirements for RC mode. However, usage of all possible transmitters does not always yield better performance due to power division at the transmitter side. Moreover, SM suffers from channel correlation whereas the performance of RC shows more degradation on higher-order modulations that are required to yield the same throughput with SM.