Enhancing the decoding performance of optical wireless communication systems using receiver-side predistortion

White light emitting diodes (LEDs) have been widely utilized for illumination owing to their desired properties of inherent bright output, high efficiency, low power consumption and long life-time. They are also increasingly applied in optical wireless communications for realizing high data rate transmission. This paper presents an improved scheme relying on the insertion of a simple predistortion module before the decoder at the receiver of optical wireless communication systems that use white LEDs. The proposed predistortion scheme exploits the inherent nature of mixing the three unequal optical-power primary colours in generating white light to enhance the system's performance. Specifically, we design this predistortion module by minimizing the upper bound of the error probability in conjunction with a soft-decision decoder. Our simulation results demonstrate that the detection performance is considerably improved with the aid of the proposed predistortion module.