Adaptive Postdistortion for Nonlinear LEDs in Visible Light Communications

Abstract

In a visible light communication (VLC) system, the light-emitting diode (LED) is the major source of nonlinearity. The nonlinear effects in the VLC system are different from the conventional wireless communications system. The channel separation in the VLC system is significantly larger than the signal bandwidth; thus, the adjacent channel interference is not an issue. Predistortion technique may not be a cost-efficient approach since it needs additional feedback physical circuits at the transmitter. In this paper, we propose a postdistortion technique to estimate and compensate for the LED's nonlinearity at the receiver. The postdistortion technique only needs some additional computational resources. In addition, the proposed approach significantly improves the error-vector-magnitude and bit-error-rate performance of the VLC system. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis.