Know Your Camera! The Impact of Frame Rate Inaccuracies on Optical Camera Communication in Vehicular Applications

Optical camera communication (OCC) offers a novel approach to verifying whether two vehicles, having established an encrypted radio frequency (RF) communication link, are indeed following each other to form a vehicular platoon. This is achieved by modulating the LED taillights of the leading vehicle to transmit a signal, which is then decoded by a front-facing camera on the following vehicle. Given the lack of active synchronization in this undersampled on-off keying system, the system's performance is highly dependent on the frame rate accuracy of the receiving camera. Experiments with a full-scale prototype reveal that a bit error rate (BER) as low as 0.5 % can be maintained if the camera's actual frame rate remains within a tolerance of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\pm$</tex> 0.025 %. Beyond this tolerance, the BER increases linearly. However, reliable data transmission could still be achieved by enhancing redundancy for error correction.