A Novel Threshold Scheme for Reducing Spatial Intersymbol Interference in Vehicular Visible Light Communication Based on Image Sensors

Abstract

LEDs can be used to communicate under the premise of satisfying illumination, which lays the groundwork for visible light communication (VLC). The application of outdoor VLC has drawn more attention, especially the application of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) which can significantly improve traffic safety and information transmission efficiency. The image sensor has the characteristics of spatial separation, easily realizes MIMO, and does not need to be strictly aligned with the transmitter, so it is especially suitable for vehicular VLC. However, because of the diffuseness of LED and the small pixel size of the image sensor, it is easy to produce the blooming effects and interfering among symbols. When decoding at the receiving terminal, it will judge the status Off of LEDs to be the status On. By analysing the blooming effects caused by surrounding LEDs, a novel threshold scheme is proposed in this paper according to the probability distribution of the sum of the optical power of the LED itself and after interference. Experiments show that the proposed method has advantages in improving BER compared with the expected threshold method and the average method, especially with long-distance communication (70 m), and the BER has been improved by 57% and 39%, respectively.