Visible Light Communications for Scooter Safety: Implementation and Evaluation

This thesis evaluates the feasibility of the VLC(visible light communication)
used in scooter V2V networks scenario by implementing a VLC system
which uses the scooter’s tail light as the transmitting component, and we develop
a theoretical BER model of our scooter VLC system based on the collected
real world data. VLC is a wireless communication technology using
the optical signal to carry digital information by controlling the LED’s light
intensity in free space. It obtains the opportunities raised by the increasing
trends on the usage of LEDs. VLC has several advantages compared to traditional
RF; first, VLC is more secure than RF because it requires line-of-sight
for transmission. Second, VLC is a low cost solution, as LEDs are already
commonly available in the cars. Third, VLC is safer than RF because it operates
in visible light spectrum. Fourth, VLC is more scalable also because
of the line-of-sight transmission requirement. In our work, we apply Gnuradio
and SDR (software defined radio) to be our core development tools to
implement the VLC scooter system. We use the scooter’s tail light as our
transmitting component and a amplified photodiode module as our receiving
component. We have some experiment results by using this VLC system and
build a theoretical model of our scooter VLC system.