Least minimum symbol error rate based post-distortion for adaptive mobile VLC transmission with receiver selection

Abstract

In the context of beyond-5G indoor communication systems, visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a viable supplement for existing RF-based systems and as an enabler for high data-rate communications. However, the existing indoor VLC systems are limited by detrimental outages caused by fluctuations in the VLC channel-gain due to user-mobility. Furthermore, the nonlinear characteristics of the light-emitting diode (LED) degrade the performance of VLC systems in the high-power regime by warping the input constellation. Additional performance-limits are introduced by inter-symbol interference (ISI) due to finite modulation-bandwidth of LEDs, and reflections from walls. In this paper, a random Fourier feature (RFF) based post-distorter is considered for mitigating the LED nonlinearity, and relevant expressions for the signal to noise ratio (SNR) are derived for a direct current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) system. Based on the derived expressions for SNR, the effects of user-mobility and ISI are mitigated by a DCO-OFDM based adaptive VLC transmission technique, which varies the transmission-rate/modulation-order under a specified error-rate constraint. Simulations are presented over channels obtained by ray-tracing, which indicates that the proposed algorithm achieves superior data-rates with a significantly lower error-rate.