Design of infrared electronic-toll-collection systems with extended communication areas and performance of data transmission

Based on our previous works in the design of an infrared emitter for electronic-toll-collection (ETC) applications, we use the unidirectional cosineⁿ functions to approximate the irregular radiation pattern for typical infrared low-cost commercial light-emitting diodes (LEDs) with a half-intensity angle Φ_1/2 = 10°. With the aid of this approximation, the main characteristics of the performance of an infrared ETC system utilizing this type of LED as the emitter can be investigated based on the received signal strength of the system. For onoff keying, a simple model connecting the received signal strength and the bit error rate (BER) of the system is further established. From the calculated or the measured received signal strength of the system, it is not difficult to estimate the system performance in terms of the BER by this simple model. Roughly speaking, for a typical setting of the circuit parameters and a typical uplink and downlink data-transmission protocol, the data transmission can be very successful in terms of a very low BER if the received signal strength is 1.3 times stronger than the signal strength received at the communication boundary. The emitter presented in this paper is able to produce a relatively extended communication area in the vehicle-traveling direction, resulting in longer communication time interval for the data transmission between the onboard unit (OBU) and the roadside unit (RSU) than conventional emitters. Furthermore, the design presented in this paper is validated by experimental measurement to demonstrate its effectiveness.