Section: New Results

Vehicle to vehicle visible light communication

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

Visible Light Communication (VLC) technology utilizes the light spectral range between 380 nm and 750 nm, which enables the dual functionality of lightning and information delivery. A use of VLC for the ITS domain has many benefits including that it can be a complementary technology to the IEEE 802.11p, which is the radio communications technology dedicated to the V2X communication but suffers from its channel congestion problem.

This year, we conducted theoretical and experimental studies on the optical channel characteristics. Based on our studies and the previous contributions, we developed a transmitter and receiver VLC prototype to be integrated to the vehicle lightning systems dedicated to platooning applications. Using the low-cost Arduino micro-controller, a transmitter broadcasts the vehicle status information including the vehicle identity, velocity, orientation, acceleration through the vehicle rear Light Emitting Diodes (LED). The receiver is based on a simple Photo Diode (PD) with an accurate 635 nm optical filtering stage to overcome the saturation and the unwanted ambient noise issues. Experimental studies show that the system can provide 8.5 Kbps of information delivery between vehicles with up to 30 meters of bumper to bumper distance.