Visible Light Communication for Vehicular Networking: Performance Study of a V2V System Using a Measured Headlamp Beam Pattern Model

In this article, we discuss visible light communication (VLC) in the context of vehicular communication networks. With the omnipresence of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in outdoor and automotive lightings, VLC emerges as a natural candidate for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. We first provide an overview of this emerging research area highlighting recent advances and identifying open problems for further research. Then, we present the performance evaluation of a typical V2V VLC system with realistic automative light sources. Our evaluation takes into account the measured headlamp beam pattern and the impact of road reflected light. We demonstrate that depending on the photodetector (PD) position above the ground level, a data rate of 50 Mb/s can be achieved at 70 m.