Heterogeneous Visible Light and Radio Communication for Improving Safety Message Dissemination at Road Intersection

Visible light communication (VLC) has recently emerged as an affordable and scalable technology supporting very high data rates for short range vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. In this work, we advocate the use of vehicular-VLC (V-VLC) for basic safety messages (BSMs) dissemination in lieu of conventional vehicular radio frequency (V-RF) communication in road intersection applications, where the reception performance is affected by interference from the concurrent transmissions of other vehicles. We make use of stochastic geometry to characterize the interference from the same lane as well as the perpendicular lane for various network configurations, i.e., standalone V-VLC, stand-alone V-RF and hybrid V-VLC/V-RF network. Specifically, by modelling the interfering vehicles’ locations as a spatial Poisson point process (PPP), we are able to capture a static two-dimensional road geometry as well as the impact of interference due to vehicles clustering in the vicinity of road intersection in terms of outage probability and throughput. In addition to above, the performance of spatial ALOHA and carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance medium access control (CSMA/CA MAC) protocol for standalone V-VLC, standalone V-RF and hybrid V-VLC/V-RF network configuration for relaying BSMs at road intersection is also compared. The performance metrics such as delay outage rate (DOR) and information outage rate (IOR) are utilized to investigate the impact of latency associated with various network configurations. Our numerical results reveal that our proposed hybrid V-VLC/V-RF leads to significant improvement in terms of outage performance, throughput and latency as compared to stand-alone V-VLC or stand-alone V-RF network.