Section: New Results

Visible Light V2V Communications for Platooning Control

Participants : Mohammad Abu Alhoul, Oyunchimeg Shagdar, Mohamed Marouf, Fawzi Nashashibi.

Fully automated vehicles have the potential to greatly improve the comfort of humans' life. For driving from one place to another, an automated vehicle must avoid collisions and be able to select non-congested roads for safe and efficient driving. In order to do that the vehicle needs to control its mobility in both macroscopic and microscopic levels by utilizing information exchange with other vehicles and roadside infrastructures based on wireless communications technology. While radio frequency channel is a convincing choose for vehicular communications due to its high data rate over relatively long coverage range (minimum several 100's meters), it is expected to experience channel congestion and low communication reliability especially for the scenario where there is high-density vehicles. In such scenarios vehicles still require to control the mobility on both the macroscopic and microscopic levels, we need to look for supportive and at the same time practical communication media with the ability to support sufficient connection between vehicles. According to the latest standard from IEEE, 802.15.7 for 2011, the communication coverage of Visible Light Communication (VLC) can reach up to 10's of meters, which match the information exchange requirements for mobility control in microscopic level. Motivated by this we started our research activity on modeling of visible light communications channel and design of microscopic mobility control, specifically platooning control, using VLC.