Optimal training sequences for indoor wireless optical communications

Since indoor wireless optical communication (WOC) systems can offer several potential advantages over their radio frequency counterparts, there has been a growing interest in indoor WOC systems. Influenced by the complicated optical propagation environment, there exist multipath propagation phenomena. In order to eliminate the effect of multipath propagation, much attention should be concentrated on the channel estimation in indoor WOC systems. This paper investigates optimal training sequences (TSs) for estimating a channel impulse response in indoor WOC systems. Based on the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) theorem, an explicit form of search criterion is found. Optimum TSs are obtained and tabulated by computer search for different channel responses and TS lengths. Measured by mean square error (MSE) performance, channel estimation errors are also investigated. Simulation results show that the MSE of the channel estimator at the receiver can be reduced significantly by using the optimized TS set. Moreover, the longer the TS, the better the MSE performance that can be obtained when the channel order is fixed.