An investigation on the performance of hybrid visible light and radio frequency for vehicular communication

Abstract

With the advent of connected autonomous vehicles, we are expecting to witness a new era of un- precedented user experiences, improved road safety, a wide range of compelling transportation applications, etc. A large number of disruptive communication technologies are emerging for the sixth generation (6G) wireless network aiming to support advanced use cases for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). An example of such a disruptive technology is constituted by hybrid Visible Light Communication (VLC) and Radio Frequency (RF) systems, which can play a major role in advanced ITS. The first part of this dissertation highlights the potential benefit of employing vehicular- VLC (V-VLC) along with conventional vehicular-RF (V-RF) for enhanced vehicular message dissemination at road intersection. Further, we propose two practical deployment strategies namely hybrid RF-VLC with relaying and V-RF with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) which may serve as a preferred alternative for future ITS to meet ultra-high reliable and ultra-low latency communication for 6G vehicular networks. In order to provide vehicles with reliable, ubiquitous, and massive connectivity, an appro- priate multiple access (MA) scheme should be adopted. An appealing MA scheme referred to as non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been gaining significant research attention in vehicular networks among academia and industry. To this end, the proposed framework also aim to present a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis on the performance of Optical Power Domain-NOMA (OPD-NOMA) enabled V-VLC systems. In addition to above, we propose a novel cooperative NOMA (C-NOMA) assisted hybrid visible light and radio frequency communication for improving safety message dissemination at road intersection. Recently, RIS is also emerging as a disruptive communication technology for enhancing the signal quality and transmission coverage in wireless vehicular networks. Despite the widespread interest in applying RISs in various wireless vehicular environments, there is a paucity of intensive research efforts on exploring optical-RIS (O-RIS) for vehicular communication. It is anticipated that 6G-ITS applications viz. autonomous driving, platooning and cooperative driving shall witness the proliferation of such O-RIS and hybrid RF-VLC technologies, while fulfilling stringent 6G key performance indicators (KPIs) requirements. Motivated by the above insights, the proposed work also aim to highlight the advantageous amalgamation of O-RIS and hybrid RF-VLC technologies for enhanced vehicular message dissemination particularly at road intersection. The proposed analytical framework developed in this dissertation allows us to answer several important questions pertaining to transportation networks, smart infrastructure planning, and personnel deployment.