Advanced solutions of Visible Light Communication for Infomobility Applications

The replacement of conventional light sources with Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) has recently increased scientific and industrial activity in Visible Light Communications (VLC). In the VLC, the same optical radiation in the visible light spectrum used to standard illumination is also used for data communication through a fast modulation of the light source. VLC systems have a great potential for different applications, in particular for infomobility, due to their efficiency and low latency. The VLC for infomobility can be used for applications in offices, in museums and in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The main aim of this PhD dissertation is a characterization of communication channel between a traffic light and a vehicle for ITS applications. This is a typical example of communication Infrastructure to Vehicular (I2V). After creating a low-cost prototype IEEE802.15.7 complaint, the communication channel has been analyzed through some tests. Each test was necessary in order to characterize every singular components of the system. The propagation channel has been deeply investigated to characterize the irregular optical path of transmission of the regulatory traffic light and to study the optical lens used for receiving a signal. Finally, the performance of this system was evaluated in terms of Packet Error Rate (PER). The created system has been used also in 5G experiments in Prato, and the latency of a joint 5G-VLC communication has been measured. In addition, two other aspects of VLC are present in this PhD dissertation: a comparative study between lighting design standards for illumination system and the lighting design for optimization signal of VLC system and a study of human perceptions of objects illuminated by a lamp with VLC system integrated.