Study of cooperative diversity scheme based on visible light communication in VANETs

Enormous applications which are enabled using Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) require a both efficient and reliable data delivery. Visible Light Communication (VLC), which has high transmission rate without using Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum, is regard as a candidate for data transmission in VANETs. Since a VLC system requires a line-of-sight communication, the position and the posture of LEDs and receivers play key roles in VLC. Unfortunately the position and the posture always change with vehicle motion and may make the performance of VLC become severe and even result in the outage of VLC. In this paper, we present an improved Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) model and an improved Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) model in consideration of the position and the posture. In order to get diversity gains and reduce the VLC interruption caused by vehicle motion, we propose a VLC based cooperative diversity scheme. Finally simulation results show that the cooperative diversity scheme can decrease the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) significantly and reduce the VLC interruption caused by vehicle motion.