Physics-Based LED Modeling and Nonlinear Distortion Mitigating With Real-Time Implementation

In this paper, a nonlinear model for Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) inspired by semiconductor physics, and a corresponding post-compensator are implemented in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for real-time Visible Light Communications (VLC). Our experiments demonstrate that the LED model effectively characterizes the dynamic LED nonlinearity, including the memory effects. The output signal of this nonlinear LED model shows a good resemblance with the measured LED output. In addition, a dedicated nonlinear equalizer, say, a post-compensator, inspired by this LED physical model can mitigate the nonlinear distortion substantially. Thereby it facilitates high data rate over the bandwidth-limited LED. It shows that the nonlinear compensator is attractive for practical real-time digital signal processing systems due to its high performance and low complexity.