Analysis of Multi-Hop Relaying in VLC-Based Vehicular Networks

Vehicular communications has gained a lot of attention over the past few years due to the rise in autonomous vehicles and intelligent transportation systems. However, due to the large numbers of vehicles that need to communicate with each others, traditional communication using Radio frequency might not be adequate. Visible light communications (VLC)was shown to be a suitable replacement as vehicles already have head and taillights which can support VLC with no need to install additional hardware. This paper analyzes the performance of a VLC based vehicular network employing decode and forward multi-hop relaying. Additionally, the optimum location and power allocation of the relays in order to optimizes the bit error rate is studied. It is found that the best achievable BER and data rate is when the relay at half the distance between the source and destination.