Visible light communications in vehicular networks for cellular offloading

The acquisition of environmental information from vehicles is expected to overload cellular networks. Short range vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside wireless communication technologies, such as IEEE 802.11p, are being foreseen for the offloading of cellular networks. A nearer breakthrough in this direction is represented by visible light communication (VLC), which can exploit light emitting diodes (LEDs) in the rear and head lights of vehicles to communicate with neighbors in visibility. In this paper, we investigate the impact of VLC between vehicles for data exchanging and cellular network offloading. Specifically, vehicles communicate through VLC and exploit traffic lights as road side units to collect information toward a remote control center. Results are given in terms of connectivity and percentage of packets transmitted through VLC and are obtained by means of a realistic simulation tool which takes into account real roads topology, realistic traffic traces, and the characteristics of the VLC protocol stack.