Modeling vehicle-to-vehicle visible light communication link duration with empirical data

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a fast-growing technology that provides free-space wireless communications using LEDs and photodiodes. As LED becomes common in automotive lighting, Vehicular VLC (V²LC) becomes a new and low-cost solution to implement vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, in order to support many new safety and infotainment applications. In this paper, we take an experimental approach to measure the distribution of V²LC link duration. A video recorder was mounted on a taxi car while it was driven around the city, and the recorded video was post-processed to identify the taillights of other vehicles. Then, the duration of a taillight that stays in the video can be used as an approximation of the link duration of a V²LC link, if some vehicles were equipped with VLC-capable taillights. Our measurement results suggest that on average the V²LC link duration is on the order of several seconds, while the numbers could significantly vary in different scenarios. It was also found that generalized Pareto distribution can be used to model the V²LC link duration. Finally, the empirical distributions of link duration reported in this paper will be useful for future system design and performance evaluation.