Measurement Based Non-Line-Of-Sight Vehicular Visible Light Communication Channel Characterization

Abstract: Vehicular visible light communication (V-VLC) aims to provide secure complementary vehicle to everything communications (V2X) to increase road safety and traffic efficiency. V-VLC provides directional transmissions, mainly enabling line-of-sight (LoS) communications. However, reflections due to nearby objects enable non-line-of-sight (NLoS) transmissions, extending the usage scenarios beyond LoS. In this paper, we propose a wide-band measurement-based NLoS channel characterization and evaluate the performance of direct current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) V-VLC scheme for NLoS channel. We propose a distance-based NLoS V-VLC channel path loss model considering reflection surface characteristics and NLoS V-VLC channel impulse response (CIR) incorporating the temporal broadening effect due to vehicle reflections through weighted double gamma function. The proposed path loss model yields higher accuracy up to 14 dB when compared to the single order reflection model whereas the CIR model estimates the full width at half maximum up to 2 ns accuracy. We further demonstrate that the target bit-error-rate of 10^-3 can be achieved up to 7.86 m, 9.79 m, and 17.62 m distances for black, orange, and white vehicle reflection induced measured NLoS V-VLC channels for DCO-OFDM transmissions.