Experimental Evaluation of Traffic Light to Vehicle Visible Light Communications in Snowfall Conditions

Abstract

Current research studies envision that the safety and the efficiency of road transportation can be significantly improved with the help of wireless communication technologies that enable inter-vehicle and traffic infrastructure to vehicle data exchange. Nevertheless, some studies also demonstrate that existing wireless technologies can have reliability issues that postpone their market deployment in automotive applications. In this context, this paper provides an analysis concerning the effect of snowfall on the performances of outdoor visible light communications (VLC). Thus, this work provides the results for the experimental evaluation of a 50 meters VLC traffic light to VLC receiver link in snowfall conditions. The experimental results show that moderate snow has a limited effect on VLC performances, whereas intensive snowfall and blizzard episodes significantly affect the Bit Error Ratio. So, the experimental results demonstrate that a physical BER as low as 10-7 can be achieved, whereas snowfall and blizzard can increase the error ratio up to 10-3 values.