Sensor and Map-Aided Cooperative Beam Tracking for Optical V2V Communications

This paper focuses on advanced pointing strategies enabling high data-rate directional vehicular communications. New emerging technologies aim to meet the challenging performance requirements of enhanced Vehicle-to-Everything (eV2X) applications by using highly collimated beams, which must rely on a very precise beam alignment. In this work, Free-Space Optics (FSO) is considered, and a system architecture is introduced together with algorithms for an accurate alignment of laser beam. The presented architecture exploits on-board sensor data sharing among vehicles to predict the pointing directions for FSO, thus counteracting the detrimental effect of motion, vibrations and tilting of vehicles. A solution is proposed for an accurate prediction of the FSO pointing direction, based on the sharing of vehicle kinematic data over a parallel wireless control link, augmented by prior information extracted from digital maps of the driving environment. Simulation results point out the challenges of a FSO V2V communication and highlight the feasibility of the proposed solution, considering both state of the art technology and future perspective hardware.