Iterative near maximum-likelihood sequence detection for MIMO optical wireless systems

A major performance-limiting factor in terrestrial optical wireless (OW) systems is turbulence-induced fading. Exploiting the additional degrees of freedom in the spatial dimension, multiple laser transmitters combined with multiple receive apertures provide an effective solution for fading mitigation. Although multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) OWsystems have been extensively studied in recent years, most of these works are mainly limited to symbol-by-symbol decoding. MLSD exploits the temporal correlation of turbulence-induced fading and promises further performance gains. In this paper, we investigate MLSD for intensity-modulation/direct-detection MIMO OW systems over log-normal atmospheric turbulence channels. Even with a low-order modulation scheme such as OOK, which is typically used inOWsystems, the complexity ofMLSD might be prohibitive. e therefore present an iterative sequence detector based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is considerably less than a direct evaluation of the log-likelihood function, and it is independent of the channel'a fading statistics. The Monte Carlo simulation results demonstrate that the EM-based algorithm outperforms the symbol-by-symbol decoder and achieves a performance, which lies within 0.3 dB of that of the optimal MLSD.