Time-of-flight based optical communication for safety-critical applications in autonomous driving

The automotive field has seen tremendous research effort in the past years to increase safety by using vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication. There are however several issues in RF based V2V communication impairing the safety applications requiring hard-reality communication. Channel congestion, latency and the vulnerability to denial of service attacks demand for an alternative solution to transmit timecritical safety messages. In this work, we discuss the security and safety aspects of free-space optical communication solutions for line-of-sight V2V communication. We show scenarios to demonstrate the high demand of a reliable lowlatency communication link between cars and evaluate the requirements in communication security. Image sensor based communication is widely accepted as the most promising optical communication link for V2V. This work offers a detailed discussion on how it is possible to increase speed and robustness by using Time-of-Flight 3D image sensors for communication. Finally, we show how communication partners can be localized and how locationaware communication can greatly benefit secured communication by mitigating relay and denial-of-service attacks.