Real-world Latency Analysis of Vehicular Visible Light Communication with Multiple LED Transmitters and an Event-Based Camera

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an event-camera-based VLC system for vehicular communication that addresses multiple transmitters, latency, and bandwidth challenges, showing feasibility for real-world V2X applications.

Contribution

It introduces a protocol and method for multi-transmitter reception and latency evaluation in vehicular VLC using event cameras, advancing practical V2X communication.

Findings

Successfully received signals from up to three LEDs simultaneously.

Achieved low end-to-end latency suitable for cooperative perception.

System operates effectively in real vehicular scenarios.

Abstract

Event cameras offer high temporal resolution, low latency, and wide dynamic range, making them promising receivers for visible light communication (VLC) in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) applications. This work presents an event-camera-based VLC system addressing three key challenges: bandwidth saturation, multi-transmitter reception, and latency characterization. We adopt a positive-event-only mode and design a protocol that suppresses event generation while maintaining communication distance and a wide field of view. We also propose a method to identify multiple transmitters and demonstrate simultaneous reception from up to three LEDs. Finally, we evaluate end-to-end latency in real vehicular scenarios and show that the system meets cooperative perception requirements. These results demonstrate that event-camera-based VLC is a feasible complement to existing V2X technologies (e.g., RF).