Multi-User SLNR-Based Precoding With Gold Nanoparticles in Vehicular VLC Systems

Visible spectrum is an emerging frontier in wireless communications for enhancing connectivity and safety in vehicular environments. The vehicular visible light communication (VVLC) system is a key feature in leveraging existing infrastructures, but it still has several critical challenges. Especially, VVLC channels are highly correlated due to the small gap between light emitting diodes (LEDs) in each headlight, making it difficult to increase data rates by spatial multiplexing. In this paper, we exploit recently synthesized gold nanoparticles (GNPs) to reduce the correlation between LEDs, i.e., the chiroptical properties of GNPs for differential absorption depending on the azimuth angle of incident light are used to mitigate the LED correlation. In addition, we adopt a signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR)-based precoder to support multiple users. The ratio of RGB light sources in each LED also needs to be optimized to maximize the sum SLNR satisfying a white light constraint for illumination since the GNPs can vary the color of transmitted light by the differential absorption across wavelength. The nonconvex optimization problems for precoders and RGB ratios can be solved by the generalized Rayleigh quotient with the approximated shot noise and successive convex approximation (SCA). The simulation results show that the SLNR-based precoder with the optimized RGB ratios significantly improves the sum rate in a multi-user vehicular environment and the secrecy rate in a wiretapping scenario. The proposed SLNR-based precoding verifies that the decorrelation between LEDs and the RGB ratio optimization are essential to enhance the VVLC performance.