While several communication methods have shown promise for future of connected vehicles, two stand out as candidates for modern adoption:
- Volume capability,
- Latency, and
- Stability requirements
These two technologies address different aspects of the residual communications challenges that result from leveraging legacy protocols.
Current wireless technologies do not adequately address the exponential increase in:
- Volume capability,
- Latency, and
- Stability requirements
needed to satisfy the needs of full autonomous vehicular traffic, especially in automotive travel where Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications are required.
One of the great challenges in the projected vehicular travel of the future is the level of connectivity. As autonomous driving features become more prevalent, more and more bandwidth is needed to satisfy the data needs.
There are situations (big city traffic, High rise towers, etc.) where the sheer volume of vehicles would benefit from having a secondary line-of-sight communications capability which operates on a completely different physical medium. This enables:
- More efficient localized communications,
- Less impactful aggregation of data points, and
- A built-in redundancy for localized sources.
The combination of 5G and Li-Fi V2X solution provides such a symbiotic relationship that makes connected/autonomous vehicles and platooning possible. To demonstrate the successful integration of these various technologies, both today and in the future, we designed our Li-Fi V2X to power next-generation autonomy and safety.
With our solution we demonstrate how vehicle’s collected data, such as braking, steering, safety and security, etc. is captured by the I/O controller module ( e.g. CompactRIO), from the vehicle’s Controller Area Network data bus (CAN bus) and then sent to the Li-Fi V2X driver of the vehicle headlights and taillights.
The driver modulates the lights to transmit the data, which is then received by the Li-Fi V2X receiver on the other vehicles. The receiver has been designed as a hybrid technology solution based on PD and OCC technologies combined. This noble design enables our solution to have required essential characteristic by connected and autonomous vehicles such as:
- High-speed connectivity (several tens of Mbps)
- Secure connectivity by eliminating RF exposure, as well as the possibility of RF jamming/interference
- Long range of distance communication (several tens of meters)
- Operating in outdoor environments conditions such as fog, dust, etc.
- Connecting with several different sources of lights simultaneously (multiple vehicles)
- Eliminating light source jamming and disturbance (e.g. sunlight)
- Identifying and filtering unauthenticated source (e.g. hacking lights)
- Balanced co-channeling with 5G
- No EMI
- Low latency (<1ms)
To demonstrate the functionality of the Li-Fi V2X solution we utilize augmented reality app and OCC technology on the mobile devices which display the received information from different light sources simultaneously, identifying in addition to the transmitted data, unwanted sources of light (disturbance) and unauthenticated sources (attempted hackers)