Study of the Performance of Deep Learning-Based Channel Equalization for Indoor Visible Light Communication Systems

Abstract

The inherent impairments of visible light communication (VLC) in terms of nonlinearity of light-emitting diode (LED) and the optical multipath restrict bit error rate (BER) performance. In this paper, a model-driven deep learning (DL) equalization scheme is proposed to deal with the severe channel impairments. By imitating the block-by-block signal processing block in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication, the proposed scheme employs two subnets to replace the signal demodulation module in traditional system for learning the channel nonlinearity and the symbol de-mapping relationship from the training data. In addition, the conventional solution and algorithm are also incorporated into the system architecture to accelerate the convergence speed. After an efficient training, the distorted symbols can be implicitly equalized into the binary bits directly. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can address the overall channel impairments efficiently and can recover the original symbols with better BER performance. Moreover, it can still work robustly when the system is complicated by serious distortions and interference, which demonstrates the superiority and validity of the proposed scheme in channel equalization.