Data dissemination to vehicles using 5G and VLC for Smart Cities

The fifth generation (5G) mobile network will provide features that are not possible with the current technology. 5G enables new services for the city of the future, such as realtime information to the vehicles. In this type of service, latency is one of the key element. 5G and VLC are both technologies that can provide ultra-low latency services. In this paper, we describe an original experiment: a VLC link between traffic-light and vehicle, supported by a 5G network. In particular, IoT sensors data flows are gathered together by the 5G network and sent to the traffic-light which sends this information to the vehicle by modulating the light (VLC). The results show that the joint use of 5G and VLC can provide very low latency at the receiver.