Vehicular Visible Light Communications with A Solar Panel Receiver

The wide availability of light-emitting diode (LED)-based light sources makes possible the use of visible light communication (VLC) for both indoor and vehicular wireless connectivity. Earlier works on VLC have predominantly used photodetectors as receivers. It is also possible to utilize solar panels as receivers. In this paper, we present an experimental performance evaluation of a vehicular VLC system with a truck headlight as the transmitter and a solar panel as the receiver. First, we characterize the frequency response of two different solar panels and measure their bandwidth. Then, we present the performance of the vehicular VLC system in terms of data rate, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and eye diagrams