On the performance of MIMO vehicular visible light communications

Abstract

Vehicular communication has attracted much interest as one of the essential elements of intelligent transportation systems. It allows connectivity and data sharing between the traveling vehicles along the road in a way to improve road safety and offer comfortable driving during trips. In this paper, we investigate the performance of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) vehicular communication system utilizing the visible light communication (VLC) technology. Specifically, we consider a VLC based-vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) system, where the two vehicles follow each other on a single-lane road. We construct a 2 × 2 MIMO transmission system utilizing the two headlights of the source vehicle as wireless transmitters while two photodetectors (PDs) are installed at the destination vehicle acting as wireless receivers. For obtaining the optical channel gain, we adopt the ray-tracing of OpticStudio taking into account the possibility of both vertical and horizontal displacements between the vehicles same as the effect of weather conditions. The received optical power and the bit-error-rate (BER) are investigated for each MIMO link between transmitters and receivers. The impact of displacements, weather conditions, and receiver apertures is also addressed