Low complexity least minimum symbol error rate based post-distortion for vehicular VLC

Abstract

Vehicular visible light communications (VLC) has emerged as a viable supplement for high speed next-generation vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication systems. However, performance of a V2V-VLC link is impaired due to nonlinear transfer-characteristics of light emitting diodes (LEDs), and inter-symbol interference (ISI). In this article, a low-complexity least-squares based post-distortion algorithm is formulated over reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) for a multi-hop V2V-VLC link. The impairments encountered in V2V-VLC channels are mitigated in RKHS by a minimum symbol error-rate post-distorter using a low dimensional approximation of random Fourier features (RFF) (which is a soft approximation of the feature-map to RKHS), that facilitates computationally simple post-distortion under finite memory-budget. The convergence and the BER-performance of the proposed post-distorter is analyzed over realistic V2V VLC channels obtained via ray-tracing. From the analysis, and the presented computer-simulations, the proposed post-distorter is found to exhibit equivalent convergence characteristics and error-rate over reasonable distances, with much lower computational complexity.