Demo: Visible Light Communications for Scooter Safety
Shun-Hsiang You
12, Shih-Hao Chang
1†, Hao-Min Lin
12, and Hsin-Mu Tsai
12Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center1 and Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering2
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
{r00922131,d00922003,hsinmu}@csie.ntu.edu.tw, jonhenry02@gmail.com
†ABSTRACT
Scooters are commonly used in many countries due to their low sale price, better fuel economy, and the ability to eas- ily navigate through heavy traffic congestions. Today in Taiwan, approximately 70% of the registered vehicles are scooters. However, due to the low cost nature of the scoot- ers, many safety technologies developed for cars cannot be adopted by them; statistics show that accidents involving scooters contribute to more than 80% of fatalities in traffic accidents in Taiwan, resulting in more than 2,000 deaths an- nually. It is therefore crucial to develop a new low-cost safety system that can be used by scooters. The enabling con- cept in this new safety system is cooperation between vehi- cles: scooters and cars sharing their current status and their observation of the neighboring environment via Vehicle-to- Vehicle (V2V) communications. However, how to implement this cost efficiently remains an open issue.
Visible Light Communications (VLC) use modulated vis- ible light sources, i.e., changing the intensity of the light emitted by the source, to transmit digital information, and Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are usually used as the trans- mission source. As LEDs become commonly used in automo- tive lighting, VLC appears as an attractive and cost-effective solution to implement V2V communications [1, 2]: no extra cost is needed for the main transmission component and the additional processing circuits have very low complexity.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.1 [Network Architecture and Design]: Wireless com- munication
Keywords
Scooter; V2V; Vehicle Safety; Visible Light Communications
1. DEMONSTRATION
We will present a scooter safety system utilizing VLC im- plemented with an off-the-shelf scooter taillight. The VLC- capable taillight periodically broadcasts messages with the current status of the scooter, including the engine revolution frequency, the speed, the brake signal, and the turn signals.
After receiving a VLC message, the safety system in vehi- cles behind can either present the information directly to the driver or only present a warning to the driver when a
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
MobiSys’13, June 25–28, 2013, Taipei, Taiwan.
ACM 978-1-4503-1672-9/13/06.
Figure 1: The demonstration scenario
collision is highly possible. We implements the former in this demonstration (See Figure 1). Demonstration video is available at: http://goo.gl/lo1f9.
The main technical contribution of this work includes: (1) to the best of our knowledge, this is the first integrated ve- hicle safety system that utilizes VLC to perform V2V com- munications, broadcasting live status information obtained from the scooter; (2) we implemented our system to be a flexible development platform, based on a commonly avail- able software defined radio (SDR) platform, so that protocol and modulation designs can be easily modified for perfor- mance evaluations in the design process; (3) we used an un- modified off-the-shelf scooter taillight in our system, evaluat- ing the feasibility of applying the VLC technology to today’s product with minimum efforts. Our current implementation can transmit at a data rate of 10 Kb/s to a vehicle 20 meters away, sufficient for most vehicle safety applications.
2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported in part by National Science Coun- cil, National Taiwan University, and Intel Corporation under grants NSC101-2911-I-002-001, NSC101-2221-E-002-169, and NTU102R7501.
3. REFERENCES
[1] C. B. Liu, B. Sadeghi, and E. W. Knightly. Enabling vehicular visible light communication (V2LC) networks.
In Proc. ACM Intl. Workshop on VehiculAr Inter-NETworking (VANET), pages 41–50, 2011.
[2] A. Cailean, B. Cagneau, L. Chassagne, S. Topsu, Y. Alayli, and J-M Blosseville. Visible light
communications: Application to cooperation between vehicles and road infrastructures. In Proc. IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), pages 1055–1059, 2012.
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