Physics

Geology

Nonlinear system

Visible light communication

Bandwidth (computing)

Wireless

Bit error rate

Equalization (audio)

Algorithm

Optics

Oceanography

Compressed sensing

Engineering

Matching pursuit

Underwater acoustic communication

Artificial intelligence

Light-emitting diode

Control (management)

Electronic engineering

Adaptive equalizer

Computer science

Quantum mechanics

Control theory (sociology)

Decoding methods

Telecommunications

Underwater

Optics Express

Linear and nonlinear impairments in underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems caused by the limited bandwidth and nonlinearity of devices severely degrade the system performance. In this paper, we propose a sparse Volterra series model-based nonlinear post equalizer with greedy algorithms to mitigate the nonlinear impairments and the inter-symbol interference (ISI) in a UWOC system. A variable step size generalized orthogonal matching pursuit (VSgOMP) algorithm that combines generalized orthogonal matching pursuit (gOMP) and adaptive step size method is proposed and employed to compress the Volterra equalizer with low computational cost. A maximum data rate of 500 Mbps is realized with the received optical power of −32.5 dBm in a 7-m water tank. In a 50-m swimming pool, a data rate of 500 Mbps over 200-m underwater transmission is achieved with a BER lower than the forward error correction (FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10 −3 . The number of kernels of the sparse Volterra equalizer is reduced to 70% of that of the traditional Volterra equalizer without significant BER performance degradation. Compared with orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) scheme and regularized orthogonal match pursuit (ROMP) scheme, the VSgOMP scheme reduces the running time by 68.6% and 29.2%, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a sparse Volterra equalizer combined with VSgOMP algorithm is employed for the nonlinear equalization in a long-distance high-speed UWOC system.

200-m/500-Mbps underwater wireless optical communication system utilizing a sparse nonlinear equalizer with a variable step size generalized orthogonal matching pursuit