Comparative study of classifiers to mitigate intersymbol interference in diffuse indoor optical wireless communication links

The maximum data rate that can be achieved in diffuse indoor optical wireless communication (OWC) is limited due to the effect of intersymbol interference (ISI). The adverse effect of ISI on the system performance can be minimised using a channel equaliser at the receiver. In this study, digital signal detection is formulated as a classification problem and hence a classifier is adopted at the receiver. The bit error performance of classifiers with non-linear decision boundary including a multilayer perceptron (MLP), a support vector machine (SVM), the radial basis function (RBF), and the Bayesian classifier is studied along with traditional equaliser and reported here. The MLP offers the best performance; however there is trade-off between the performance and complexity especially at highly diffuse channel.