Erasure coding for road-to-vehicle visible light communication systems

In this paper, we focus on a road-to-vehicle visible light communication (VLC) system using LED traffic lights. In this system, an LED traffic light consists of a 2-dimensional LED array (2D LED array), and cars are equipped with high-speed 2-dimensional cameras (2D image sensors). An important issue of this system is frame loss. Sometimes, 2D image sensor in a car fails to get a frame. So as to mitigate the influence of frame loss, we propose to apply erasure coding to the road-to-vehicle VLC system. In the proposed system, a data sequence is encoded by LDPC code whose length is much longer than the size of 2D LED array. In addition, code synchronization is required for the proposed system. We also propose a code synchronization scheme, which makes use of error detection capability of LDPC code. We evaluate the performance of our proposed system, and show that it can recover frame loss for high SNR when less than 8 frames among total 18 frames are lost. In addition, we show that our proposed code synchronization scheme can ignore its errors.