Dual channel visible light communications for enhanced vehicular connectivity

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has recently been proposed as a low-cost and low-complexity technology for vehicular communications. In this paper, we propose the usage of dual channel VLC with the goal of providing enhanced vehicular connectivity to disseminate safety-critical messages and perform an experimental study to determine the spatial and angular limits of an off-the-shelf automotive Light Emitting Diode (LED) fog light. Single channel VLC refers to the independent transmission of different data packets from each LED fog light, while the dual channel VLC offers the concurrent transmission of the same data packet from both lights. There is a trade-off between increasing the angular limitation and the performance of dual channel VLC, which needs to be experimentally evaluated to identify its efficient usage. We first show the dependency of the received optical power of single channel VLC on the angle and distance, and demonstrate that Lambertian model does not represent the automotive LED fog light radiation pattern accurately. We then demonstrate that dual channel usage increases the angular limitation by up to 10° compared to the single channel VLC. We also show that dual channel improves the packet delivery error rate performance at only short distances due to the photodiode (PD) saturation led by light intensity overlapping at higher distances.