An IEEE 802.11 Compliant SDR-Based System for Vehicular Visible Light Communications

We present a complete Visible Light Communication (VLC) system for experimental Vehicular VLC (V-VLC) research activities. Visible light is becoming an important technology complementing existing Radio Frequency (RF) technologies such as Cellular V2X (C-V2X) and Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC). In this scope, first works helped introducing new simulation models to explore V-VLC capabilities, technologies, and algorithms. Yet, experimental prototypes are still in an early phase. We aim bridging this gap with our system, which integrates a custom-made driver hardware, commercial vehicle light modules, and an Open Source signal processing implementation in GNU Radio, which explicitly offers rapid prototyping. Our system supports OFDM with a variety of Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) and is compliant to IEEE 802.11; this is in line with the upcoming IEEE 802.11 LC standard as well. In an extensive series of experiments, we assessed the communication performance by looking at realistic inter vehicle distances. Our results clearly show that our system supports even higher order MCS with very low error rates over long distances.