Enhancing the bit error rate of visible light communication systems using channel estimation and channel coding

Abstract

This paper presents an improved scheme to enhance the bit error rate (BER) for indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems. The proposed scheme uses cascaded codes-based channel code and least square discrete Fourier transform (LS-DFT)-based channel estimation to improve the robustness of the indoor optical wireless communication link. The simulation results demonstrate that a 3–5 dB signal noise rate (SNR) gain can be achieved when the BER is 10−3 below the forward error correction (FEC) limit for a 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) visible light communication system.