Channel Modelling and Performance Limits of Vehicular Visible Light Communication Systems

Visible light communication (VLC) has been proposed as an alternative or complementary technology to radio frequency vehicular communications. Front and back vehicle lights can serve as wireless transmitters making VLC a natural vehicular connectivity solution. In this paper, we evaluate the performance limits of vehicular VLC systems. First, we use non-sequential ray tracing to obtain the channel impulse responses (CIRs) for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) link in various weather conditions. Based on these CIRs, we present a closed-form path loss expression which builds upon the summation of geometrical loss and attenuation loss and takes into account asymmetrical patterns of vehicle light sources and geometry of V2V transmission. The proposed expression is an explicit function of link distance, lateral shift between two vehicles, weather type (quantified by the extinction coefficient), transmitter beam divergence angle and receiver aperture diameter. Then, we utilize this expression to determine the maximum achievable link distance of V2V systems for clear, rainy and foggy weather conditions while ensuring a targeted bit error rate.