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