Performance Analysis of Indoor Vehicular VLC Links for Autonomous Driving

One of the major challenges in indoor vehicular visible light communications (VVLC) links is associated with the mobility leading to frequent handovers, consequently resulting in increased latency and processing time. Therefore, to address this challenge, an acceptable light coverage within the indoor channel, i.e., cell planning, is of paramount importance. In this paper we investigate the performance of a VLC link for an autonomous indoor vehicle and provide insights on the impact of the distance between light access points, and the light client’s (LC’s) angular field of view (AFOV) employing an imaging optical concentrator with a photodiode. We derive a mathematical expression to determine the optimum AFOV of the LC as a function of other system parameters such as the vertical link distance and incidence angles. Results show step responses in the bit-error-rate (BER) performance as the incidence angle increases outside the AFOV of the LC with the BER degrading sharply from 3.8 × 10−3 to 4.4 × 10−1 with a small increment in the incidence angle over 7.35 °.