Efficient Optical MIMO–OFDM Channel Estimation Based on Correntropy Compressive Sensing

The compressive sensing (CS) technique is widely used in the field of radio-frequency channel estimation. However, in optical wireless channel (OWC) estimation, CS needed to be adapted to cope with the nonlinear distortion resultant from the electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical conversion process of the OWC. Therefore, a robust CS channel estimation technique is proposed for the optical MIMO–OFDM system. The proposed CS channel estimation technique is based on higher-order statistics (HOS). In which, the correntropy is exploited as a HOS similarity measurement instead of the second-order statistics euclidean distance (ED) used with the conventional CS to handle the OWC nonlinear distortion. Herein, the ED is the most popular iterative CS algorithms such as orthogonal matching pursuits, sparsity adaptive matching pursuit, and self-aware step size sparsity adaptive matching pursuit is efficiently replaced by the HOS correntropy based CS to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, the most recent visible light communication system GLIM-OFDM is considered here to test the proposed technique. However, the pre-estimated channel state information (CSI) obtained from the previous OFDM frame is exploited as initial information in estimating the CSI of the current OFDM frame, which improves overall system performance. A comparison with the conventional CS reconstruction algorithms is conducted via extensive simulation analysis. The simulation results show the superiority of the bit error rate of the proposed correntropy based CS channel estimation scheme compared to the conventional CS-based channel estimation algorithms.