Vehicle-to-Vehicle Relay-Assisted VLC With Misalignment Induced Azimuth or Elevation Offset Angles

This letter investigates a vehicle-to-vehicle relay-assisted visible light communications link with amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying schemes and analyze the effect of the relay vehicle's orientation with respect to the source vehicle. Results show up to 150 % increase in the link span under emulated sunlight for the DF relay link compared with AF at the end of the second hop using the same system parameters at the forward error correction bit error rate limit of 3.8×10 ^-3 . A method to mitigate the effect of system performance degradation due to misalignment between communicating vehicles is also proposed.