Vehicular visible light communication is an emerging technology that allows wireless communication between vehicles or between vehicles and infrastructure. In this paper, a vehicular visible light communication system is designed using a non-return to zero on-off keying modulation scheme under the effect of different weather conditions such as clear, haze, and fog. The first model is a light emitting diode-based system and the second is a laser diode-based system. For both models, the influence of system parameters such as beam divergence, transceiver aperture diameters, and receiver responsivity is studied. The impact of the use of the trans-impedance amplifier is also investigated for both models. It was concluded that in the presence of the amplifier, output power of the light emitting diode and laser diode model are increased by 98.46 µW and 0.4719 W, respectively. The performance of the two proposed models is evaluated through bit error rate, quality factor, eye diagram, and output power to have some insightful results about the quality of service for the two proposed models. Under a specific weather condition, the performance of the system would be critical and other techniques should be applied. The maximum achievable link distance for the laser-based and light-emitting diode-based systems is 190 m at a data rate of 25 Gbps and 80 m at a data rate of 60 kbps, respectively, under the same system parameters and weather conditions. The obtained results provide a full idea about the availability of constructing our proposed model in a practical environment, showing a higher performance of the laser diode-based model than that of the light emitting diode-based model.

Various intelligent transportation systems are proposed in different forms of wireless communication technologies. Recently, the importance of visible light communication and free-space optics has been demonstrated in accomplishing vehicle-to-vehicle and infrastructure-to-vehicle communication systems, due to power efficiency, free licenses, and safety for human health. In this paper, a new hybrid relay system supported by free-space optics/visible light communication with two scenarios is proposed. The first one is that the data are transferred from the source to the relay through a free-space optics communication link and are then directed to the destination through a visible light communication link. The second scenario is that the data are transmitted from the source to the destination passing through two different relays to ensure larger coverage. A 10−6 bit error rate is achieved at a distance of 900 m for the first scenario with a remarkable signal-to-noise ratio of ~25.5 dB, while the largest distance that can be covered by the second scenario is 1200 m with a signal-to-noise ratio of ~30 dB.