Design of PAM-8 VLC Transceiver System Employing Neural Network-Based FFE and Post-Equalization

Wireless communication technology adopting electromagnetic waves in an unlicensed spectrum, such as visible light, for communication has attracted wide research efforts. Visible light communication (VLC) utilizes visible light as a communication medium to transmit signals but faces a limited communication bandwidth and low data rate, which is caused by the intrinsic characteristics of LEDs. This paper first studies a mathematical model of limited bandwidth and its effect on transmitted signals and then analyzes the free space and underwater channel loss. With the theoretical analysis, a VLC transceiver system is presented for solving bandwidth limitation by utilizing a pulse-amplitude modulation-8 (PAM-8) scheme and a hybrid equalization method. The proposed hybrid equalization combined a passive equalizer, a neural network (NN)-based feed-forward equalization (FFE), and a radial basis function neural network (RBF-NN). The feasibility of this VLC system was verified through a co-simulation platform with both free-space and underwater channels. Compared with a VLC system adopting a deep neural network (DNN)-based post-equalization method, the proposed VLC system could achieve a data rate of 3.6 Gbps with a bit error rate (BER) of 3.8 × 10−3 over a 3 m free-space channel. The RBF-NN achieved a reduced training time of 10 min, which was 86.7% lower than the conventional DNN-based post-equalization method.