Vehicular Visible Light Communication System: Modeling and Visualizing Critical Outdoor Propagation Characteristics

Abstract

We propose a practical vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) visible light communications (VLC) propagation model by considering the impact of the outdoor propagation characteristics. Contrary to the existing literature, we emphasize a dynamic V2V-VLC model considering several propagation characteristics. Both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) V2V-VLC propagation models are proposed. To this end, we comprehensively demonstrate the impact of the considered propagation characteristics on the proposed LOS and NLOS V2V-VLC propagation models. To analyze the proposed propagation models, we also derive the closed-form expressions for the average path loss and discrete-input continuous-output (DCMC) capacity incorporating the considered propagation characteristics. With the help of derived closed-form expressions and simulations, we demonstrate comparative insights for the proposed LOS and NLOS V2V-VLC propagation models. Considering our key findings, it is observed that there is a path loss penalty of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx$</tex-math></inline-formula> 6 dB compared to the conventional path loss model for a worst-case weather scenario. Moreover, it is observed that the considered propagation characteristics have a significant impact on the V2V-VLC performance. Further, we observe that the ergodic DCMC capacity corresponding to the NLOS-road surface link indicates a dominant behavior compared to an NLOS link arising from an interfering vehicle; but up to a certain range of the link length.