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 MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) OW systems have been extensively studied in recent years, most of these works are mainly limited to symbol-by-symbol decoding. Maximum Likelihood Sequence Detection (MLSD) exploits the temporal correlation of turbulence-induced fading and promises further performance gains.