Mitigation of Strong Background Radiation with Attenuation Diversity for Vehicular Visible Light Communication

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based outdoor visible light communication (VLC) technology has a broad prospect in the future intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), but it's prone to the problem of receiving signal saturation distortion. So we proposed a receiver architecture with an adjustable attenuator to mitigate the saturation distortion caused by strong solar irradiance in a commercial avalanche photodiode (APD) module. The simulation results show that the proposed receiver architecture has a good performance in the outdoor VLC system for both asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) modulation and direct currentbiased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) modulation. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has excellent performance in practical systems while utilizing DCO-OFDM modulation, and the bit error rate (BER) is reduced from 0:3 to 10 under strong background light interference, which verified the feasibility of our proposed receiver architecture.