| Summary: | Visible Light Communications (VLC) is a fast-growing technology to provide data communication using low-cost and omni-present LEDs and photodiodes. In this thesis, we make the case for the use of vehicular VLC (V2LC) as follows. We describe an architecture for V2LC networks and introduce five network services that V2LC needs to provide for vehicular applications. We use a custom VLC prototype developed at Intel on which we investigate the unique networking properties of V2LC. Specifically, our experiments show that a V2LC receiver's narrow filed-of-view angle makes V2LC resilient to visible light noise from sunlight and legacy LED sources and interference from active VLC transmitters; further, V2LC can operate in full-duplex mode with the exception of being subject to multipath effects at very short distances, e.g., 1.5 m in our experiment. By performing a large scale simulation study and leveraging our experimental data, we evaluate V2LC's ability to provide network services for vehicular applications. Our results reveal two key findings: (i) in dense vehicle traffic conditions (e.g., urban highway during peak hours), V2LC takes advantage of multiple available paths to reach vehicles and overcomes the effects of packet collisions; (ii) in the presence of a visible light blockage in traffic, V2LC can still have a significant number of successful transmissions because of the dynamic gaps in the blockage caused by vehicular movements.
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