Optical vehicular communication based on a-SiC:H technology

A smart vehicle lighting system that combines the functions of illumination, signaling, communications, and positioning is presented. A traffic scenario is stablished, and tested under ideal environment conditions. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) communications are analyzed. For the V2V communication study, the emitter was developed based on the vehicle headlights, whereas for the study of I2V communication system, the emitter was built on the street-lights. The VLC receivers are located at the vehicle and are used to extract the data from the modulated light beam coming from the LEDs emitters. The VLC receiver is based on a-SiC:H technology and joins the simultaneous demultiplexing operation with the photodetection and self-amplification. The receiver and the transmitters are characterized through spectral response under different optical bias. The spectral sensitivity of the receiver and its optical gain are analyzed. An algorithm to decode the information is established. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed VLC architecture is suitable for the intended applications.