Performance analysis of vehicle-to-vehicle communications based on organic light emitting diodes and discrete multitone modulation

We provide a numerical model to investigate the performance of a visible light communication-based vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication system that incorporates organic light emitting diode (OLED) transmitters and discrete multitone modulation to overcome the bandwidth limitations of the organic devices. Different application scenarios using vehicle’s headlights and taillights as optical transmitters are considered. The results indicate the potential of using OLEDs for cooperative intelligent transportation system applications to achieve transmission of low-to-moderate data rates, providing evidence that the proposed OLED-based V2V system can achieve data communication of several Mbps. In the scenario that involves transmitting data to the leading car using the OLED headlights as transmitters, we show that the data rate can exceed 5 Mbps, despite the low modulation bandwidth of the OLED. When transmitting data to the trailing car using the taillights, we show that the transmission rate can reach 2 Mbps. We also discuss the trade-off between vehicle distance and communication performance and show that, even for distances up to 40 m, data rates on the order of several hundred kbps can be supported.