Visible Light Communications for Scooter Safety: Implementation and Evaluation

Abstract

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.