Low Complexity Post-Distorter for Visible Light Communications

Abstract

In this letter, a visible light communication (VLC) link affected by the light emitting diode (LED) nonlinearity and dispersion due to the IEEE 802.15 PAN channel impulse response is considered. To mitigate severe intersymbol interference and LED nonlinearity, computationally complex classical post-distortion techniques fall short in terms of applicability to massively connected 5G deployments (as in a VLC attocell) due to increased demand on resources and intractability of implementation. To address these issues, this letter proposes a low-complexity reproducing kernel Hilbert space-based post-distorter using a better sparsification technique equipped with an adaptive kernel width optimized by a minimum symbol error rate (MSER) criterion. Use of the proposed MSER metric for kernel width optimization reduces the computational complexity at the receiver, without compromising on the bit error rate. An upper bound on step-size to guarantee convergence of the proposed post-distorter is analytically derived, and the steady-state mean square error is also analyzed theoretically and validated by simulations. Furthermore, analytical upper bounds for bit error rate and steady-state dictionary size are also derived.