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Continuous advancements in visible-light communication (VLC) technology have paved the way for future high-capacity communication links that can simultaneously provide data transmission and illumination. VLC is being accepted as a potential complementary technology in 5G networks, and standardization efforts through IEEE 802.15.7 are on their way. Today, vehicular networking applications have become increasingly complex with tight power and performance requirements. Consequently, devices and systems that can meet diverse vehicular networking applications are in great demand. In this article, we discuss three alternatives for vehicular networking applications in (1) LED–photodiode-based active VLC, (2) VLC with a multicamera array receiver, and (3) passive VLC based on decoding information from optical backscatter. We also present our recent experimental and modeling work using our camera-based and passive VLC prototype implementations.


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Automotive Visible-Light Communication: Alternative Devices and Systems

Show Author's information Lin Cheng1( )Yue Wu2Chenren Xu3Khadija Ashraf4Ashwin Ashok4
Department of Engineering, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106, USA
Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100084, China
Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30302, USA

Abstract

Continuous advancements in visible-light communication (VLC) technology have paved the way for future high-capacity communication links that can simultaneously provide data transmission and illumination. VLC is being accepted as a potential complementary technology in 5G networks, and standardization efforts through IEEE 802.15.7 are on their way. Today, vehicular networking applications have become increasingly complex with tight power and performance requirements. Consequently, devices and systems that can meet diverse vehicular networking applications are in great demand. In this article, we discuss three alternatives for vehicular networking applications in (1) LED–photodiode-based active VLC, (2) VLC with a multicamera array receiver, and (3) passive VLC based on decoding information from optical backscatter. We also present our recent experimental and modeling work using our camera-based and passive VLC prototype implementations.

Keywords: visible-light communications, automobile, camera communications

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Publication history

Received: 26 November 2021
Revised: 02 May 2022
Accepted: 16 June 2022
Published: 06 January 2023
Issue date: August 2023

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© The author(s) 2023.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the Charles A. Dana Foundation through the Dana Research Professorship program at Trinity College.

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The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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