Experimental Characterization of Multi-Hop Vehicular VLC Systems

In vehicular visible light communication (VLC), the reliable communication distance may be relatively short due to its dependence on many factors including the weather condition. This necessitates the use of relay-assisted systems to extend the transmission range. In this paper, we investigate experimentally the performance of vehicular multi-hop VLC systems in outdoor environments. Particularly, we first examine the effect of ambient noise on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) during a whole day. Then, we conduct two multi-hop experiments, i.e., one at daytime and one at nighttime. We measure the bit error rate (BER) for each individual hop and then obtain the overall performance of the multi-hop system. We further compare experimental BER with theoretical BER to confirm our results.