Design and Intensive Experimental Evaluation of an Enhanced Visible Light Communication System for Automotive Applications

As the interest toward communication-based vehicle safety applications is increasing, the development of secure wireless communication techniques has become an important research area. In this context, the article addresses issues that are related to the use of the visible light communication (VLC) technology in vehicular applications. Thus, it provides an extensive presentation concerning the main challenges and issues that are associated to vehicular VLC applications and of some of the existing VLC solutions. Moreover, the article presents the aspects related to the design and intensive experimental evaluation of a new automotive VLC system. The experimental evaluation performed in indoor and outdoor conditions shows that the proposed system can achieve communication distances up to 50 m and bit error ratio (BER) lower than 10−6, while being exposed to optical and weather perturbations. This article provides important evidence concerning the snowfall effect on middle to long range outdoor VLC, as the proposed VLC system was also evaluated in snowfall conditions. Accordingly, the experimental evaluation showed that snowfall and heavy gust could increase bit error rate by up to 10,000 times. Even so, this article provides encouraging evidence that VLC systems will soon be able to reliably support V2X communications.

Download Full-text

An Efficient Data Transmission with GSM-MPAPM Modulation for an Indoor VLC System

Symmetry ◽

10.3390/sym11101232 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 11 (10) ◽

pp. 1232 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Bao ◽

Hsu ◽

Keyword(s):

Visible Light ◽

Short Distance ◽

Pulse Width Modulation ◽

Pulse Amplitude ◽

Visible Light Communication ◽

Spatial Modulation ◽

Theoretical Scheme ◽

Error Ratio ◽

Bit Error Ratio ◽

Dimming Control

As an emerging wireless communication technique, visible light communication is experiencing a boom in the global communication field, and the dream of accessing to the Internet with light is fast becoming a reality. The objective of this study was to put forward an efficient and theoretical scheme that is based on generalized spatial modulation to reduce the bit error ratio in indoor short-distance visible light communication. The scheme was implemented while using two steps in parallel: (1) The multi-pulse amplitude and the position modulation signal were generated by combining multi-pulse amplitude modulation with multi-pulse position modulation using transmitted information, and (2) certain light-emitting diodes were activated by employing the idea of generalized spatial modulation to convey the generated multi-pulse amplitude and position modulation optical signals. Furthermore, pulse width modulation was introduced to achieve dimming control in order to improve anti-interference ability to the ambient light of the system. The two steps above involved the information theory of communication. An embedded hardware system, which was based on the C8051F330 microcomputer and included a transmitter and a receiver, was designed to verify the performance of this new scheme. Subsequently, the verifiability experiment was carried out. The results of this experiment demonstrated that the proposed theoretical scheme of transmission was feasible and could lower the bit error ratio (BER) in indoor short-distance visible light communication while guaranteeing indoor light quality.

Download Full-text