Efficient frequency-domain channel equalisation methods for OFDM visible light communications

The authors present efficient frequency-domain channel estimation methods based on the intra-symbol frequency-domain averaging (ISFA), minimum mean squared error (MMSE) and weighted inter-frame averaging (WIFA) schemes for the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) visible light communications (VLC) system. OFDM-VLC with quadrature phase shift keying, 16- and 64-quadrature amplitude modulation mapping is experimentally demonstrated. Compared with the conventional least square channel estimation method, ISFA, MMSE and WIFA offer improved performance with MMSE offering the best performance in terms of the error vector magnitude but at the cost of high complexity. The authors show that the WIFA can improve the estimation accuracy of time-varying VLC optical channel.