Performance Analysis of RKHS Based Detectors for Nonlinear NLOS Ultraviolet Communications

Ultraviolet (UV) communication has emerged as a promising solution for providing non-line-of-sight (NLOS) wireless connectivity due to strong molecular and aerosol scattering at UV wavelength. However, performance of UV based communication systems is severely impaired due to nonlinear transfer-characteristics of light emitting diode (LED), which degrades the overall symbol error rate (SER) performance. In addition, UV based communication systems are also impaired by multiplicative distortion due to turbulence, that causes detrimental instantaneous outages. Hence, in this work, first an expression for the outage probability is derived for a nonlinear UV communication system via analytical characterization of the statistics of the additive distortion. Further, utilizing the proposed analytical model for additive distortion, the error rate of reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) based detectors is quantified for the nonlinear outdoor NLOS UV channel. Additionally, using the derived expression for error-rate, an RKHS based minimum symbol error rate (MSER) equalizer is formulated to mitigate the distortion due to LED nonlinearity, and to enhance the error-rate performance of the considered nonlinear NLOS UV link. Convergence of the proposed MSER equalizer is analyzed, and improvements in error-rate promised by the proposed equalizer are validated by computer simulations over typical NLOS UV channels.