VANET 2.0: Integrating Visible Light with Radio Frequency Communications for Safety Applications

Wireless communications and networking technologies are the foundations for road safety applications in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). Since VANET employing IEEE 802.11p only suffers from broadcast storm problems at a high vehicle density, many clustering schemes have been proposed and yet still can’t effectively address the interference problems. Later, some scholars envisioned applying Visible Light Communications (VLC) as the wireless communication technology in VANET. However, VLC requires a strict line-of-sight transmission to maintain stable system performance. In this paper, we propose a hybrid architecture which integrates IEEE 802.11p based VANET with the VLC system. Then, we design a novel Multi-hop Clustering Scheme based on the weighed Virtual Distance Detection (MCSVDD) for the safety message delivery. Through network simulations, we demonstrate far superior performance of the IEEE 802.11p-VLC hybrid VANET architecture compared to that of NHop scheme through key metrics such as maximum delay and normalized goodput.