This paper reports a detailed experimental characterization of optical performances of Visible Light Communication (VLC) system using a real traffic light for ultra-low latency, infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) communications for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) protocols. Despite the implementation of long sought ITS protocols poses the crucial need to detail how the features of optical stages influence the overall performances of a VLC system in realistic configurations, such characterization has rarely been addressed at present. We carried out an experimental investigation in a realistic configuration where a regular traffic light (TX), enabled for VLC transmission, sends digital information towards a receiving stage (RX), composed by an optical condenser and a dedicated amplified photodiode stage. We performed a detailed measurements campaign of VLC performances encompassing a broad set of optical condensers, and for TX-RX distances in the range 3 - 50 m, in terms of both effective field of view (EFOV) and packet error rate (PER). The results show several nontrivial behaviors for different lens sets as a function of position on the measurement grid, highlighting critical aspects as well as identifying most suitable optical configurations depending on the specific application and on the required EFOV. In this paper we also provide a theoretical model for both the signal intensity and the EFOV as a function of several parameters, such as distance, RX orientation and focal length of the specific condenser. Our results could be very relevant in the near future to assess a most suited solution in terms of acceptance angle when designing a VLC system for real applications, where angle-dependent misalignment effects play a non-negligible role, and we argue that it could have more general implications with respect to the pristine I2V case mentioned here.
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