Towards an IEEE 802.11 Compliant System for Outdoor Vehicular Visible Light Communications

As a complementary technology to existing Radio Frequency (RF)-based solutions such as Cellular V2X (C-V2X) and Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), Vehicular VLC (V-VLC) is gaining more attention in the research community as well as in the industry. This paper introduces a complete IEEE 802.11 compliant V-VLC system. The system relies on Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) software defined radios programmed using the GNU Radio framework, a typical car headlight plus a custom driver electronics for the high-power car LEDs (sender), and a photodiode (receiver). Building upon our earlier work, we, for the first time, experimentally explore the communication performance in outdoor scenarios, even in broad daylight, and show that rather simple optical modifications help to reduce the ambient noise to enable long distance visible light communication. Our system also supports Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) with a variety of Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) up to 64-QAM and is fully compliant with IEEE 802.11. We performed an extensive series of experiments to explore the performance of our system, even using higher order MCS in daylight. Our results demonstrated a high reliability for distances up to 75m with the presented system, regardless of the time of the day.