Real-time investigation of CAP transceivers with hybrid digital equalization for visible light communication.

In a practical light emitted diodes (LEDs)-based visible light communication (VLC) system, high-speed transmission is generally limited by the LED bandwidth. To address the bandwidth limitation, a hybrid digital linear and decision-feedback equalization (DFE) is investigated to improve the transmission performance (or spectral efficiency) in the carrier-less amplitude phase modulation (CAP)-based VLC systems. A real-time CAP-VLC transceiver with the hybrid digital equalization is designed, based on which 200 Mb/s transmission is successfully demonstrated over a 15 m VLC link with the commercial red LEDs (bandwidth: 6.5 MHz). In the real-time CAP-VLC system, the baseline wander (BLW) is observed, due to the removal of the low-frequency components with a direct current (DC) block. The BLW effect can be mitigated by increasing the roll-off factor. However, this roll-off factor affects the equalization performance, due to an increased loss in the signal spectrum beyond the system bandwidth. Optimization of the roll-off factor and filter length is required. Experimental results show that, with the optimized real-time transceiver design, the hybrid Wiener/recursive least squares (RLS) and DFE significantly improves the error vector magnitude (EVM) performance compared with the DFE. In addition, the digital signal processing (DSP) complexity is discussed.