Performance study and analysis of MIMO visible light communication-based V2V systems

Vehicular Visible Light Communication (VLC) has recently attracted much interest from researchers and scientists. This technology enables the connectivity between the vehicles and the infrastructures along the road utilizing the Lighting-Emitting-Diodes based vehicle HeadLights (HLs) and TailLights (TLs) as wireless transmitters. This paper investigates the performance of a Vehicle-to-Vehicle VLC system using a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) scheme. Specifically, we establish the MIMO transmission system by using the two HLs of the source vehicle as wireless transmitters and multiple receivers (RXs) installed at the rear of the destination vehicle as wireless receivers. We consider different numbers of RXs, which result in various MIMO configurations, i.e., \(2\times 2\), \(2\times 3\), and \(2\times 4\). We conduct a channel modeling study based on the non-sequential ray-tracing capabilities of the OpticStudio software to obtain the optical channel gain, considering the possibility of both horizontal and vertical displacement between vehicles. We then explore the contribution of each RX in the total received power. In addition, we investigate the effect of weather conditions, modulation orders, and artificial light sources on the bit error rate (BER) performance of the considered MIMO configurations. The obtained results demonstrate that deploying the MIMO with higher orders can significantly enhance the system performance, particularly when there is a lateral shift between the two cars. It has been drawn from our results that the required SNR to achieve a BER of 10\(^{-4}\) reduces by 6 dB when \(2\times 4\) MIMO configuration is deployed compared to the \(2\times 2\) MIMO configuration.