Suitability of visible light communication for platooning applications: An experimental study

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is a core brick of the smart vehicle, especially in highway platooning configurations where it enables the lateral and longitudinal control of the vehicle trajectory. Although very attractive, the radio systems based on the IEEE 802.11p standard that are classically used for vehicular communication suffer from serious performance degradations in dense traffic scenario, especially in terms of transmission latency. Visible light communication (VLC) has thus been proposed as a complementary technology. In this work, a simple VLC system, based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) light-emitting diodes (LED) headlamps and taillights, is presented and tested in several configurations in order to evaluate its compatibility with platooning. It is shown that the system provides, at a data rate of 100 kbps, a bit error rate (BER) below 10−6 up to 30 m using either the front or back lamps. In addition, the transmission latency is evaluated at 4.2 ms and it is found that a jamming vehicle overtaking the platoon would not cause any performance degradation. These results thus confirm the interest of VLC for platooning.