Evaluation of visible light communication channel delay profiles for automotive applications

Abstract

Abstract In this article, we present channel delay profiles based on simulated data regarding the practical conditions for the use of visible light communication (VLC) in automotive applications such as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Practical vehicular LED headlamp and street lamp that consider the lighting regulation for transportation are used to design the ITS scenarios based on VLC. We modeled two usage scenarios, crossroad and metropolitan street, using the CATIA V5 tool. Measurements for the VLC channel delay profile evaluation were then gathered by using a ray-tracing scheme employing commercial LightTools software under the vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication links. From the obtained channel impulse responses from both scenarios, we derived the VLC channel delay profiles. From them, we found that the common property of the delay profile was composed of dominant multiple line of sight (LOS) links and a less number of non-LOS delay taps. However, the channel delay profile for the V2I link and metropolitan scenario show more dispersive channel characteristics due to the reflection and diffusion of the visible light.