Citation

Căilean AM, Dimian M, Popa V. Sensors (Basel) 2020; 20(13): e3764.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s20133764

PMID

32635604

Abstract

Visible light communications are considered as a promising solution for inter-vehicle communications, which in turn can significantly enhance the traffic safety and efficiency. However, the vehicular visible light communications (VLC) channel is highly dynamic, very unpredictable, and subject to many noise sources. Enhancing VLC systems with self-aware capabilities would maximize the communication performances and efficiency, whatever the environmental conditions. Within this context, this letter proposes a novel signal to noise ratio (SNR)-adaptive visible light communication receiver architecture aimed for automotive applications. The novelty of this letter comes from an open loop signal processing technique in which the signal treatment complexity is established based on a real-time SNR analysis. So, the receiver evaluates the SNR, and based on this assessment, it reconfigures its structural design in order to ensure a proper signal treatment, while providing an optimal tradeoff between communication performances and computational resources usage. This approach based on software reconfiguration has the potential to provide the system with enhanced flexibility and enables its usage in resource sharing application. As far as we know, this approach has not been considered in vehicular VLC systems. The performances of the proposed architecture are demonstrated by simulations, which confirm the SNR-adaptive capacity and the optimized performances.

Language: en

Keywords

adaptive communication; context-adaptive receiver; inter-vehicle communications; reconfigurable computing; SNR-adaptive receiver; visible light communication