5328 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 14, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2015
diodes (LED). We consider a mu lti-path channel characterized
by the following channel outputs
y(τ ) =
D
d=0
h
d
x(τ − dT) + n(τ ), (1)
where T is the length of each symbol interval and n(τ ) is
background radiation intensity. Assume constant background
radiation in tensity, i.e, n(τ ) = N for a constant N. Note that the
energy received in interval [tT,(t + 1)T], denoted as X
t
,isthe
integration of the optical intensity in that slot, given by
X
t
=
(t+1)T
tT
y(τ )dτ
=
D
d=0
h
d
(t+1)T
tT
x(τ − dT)dt +
(t+1)T
tT
n(τ )dτ
=
D
d=0
h
d
P
t−d
T + NT, (2)
where P
t
denotes the transmission power in interval t.
Assume Poisson channel, with the constant ratio α between
the mean received signal photon number and the received signal
energy. Then from (2), the number of received signal photons
satisfies a Poisson distribution with the mean given by
αX
t
=
D
d=0
αh
d
P
t−d
T + αNT
=
D
d=0
α
d
P
t−d
+ λ, (3)
where α
d
= αh
d
T and λ
= αNT. From (3), it is seen that the
number o f received photons at slot t, d enoted as u
t
, can be
expressed as follows,
u
t
=
D
d=0
v
t−d,d
+ n
t
, (4)
where v
t−d,d
denotes the number o f received photons transmit-
ted at slots t − d satisfying the Poisson distribution with mean
α
d
P
t−d
;andn
t
denotes the number of r eceived background
noise photons satisfying Poisson distribution with mean λ.In
other words,
P(v
t−d,d
= n) =
(α
d
P
t−d
)
n
n!
e
−α
d
P
t−d
,
P(n
t
= n) =
λ
n
n!
e
−λ
. (5)
Such an LTI-Poisson channel model can be characterized as
follows.
1) Stochastic ISI Property: It is seen that the expectation of
u
t
is given as follows,
E[u
t
]=
D
d=0
E[v
t−d,d
]+E[n
t
]=
D
d=0
α
d
P
t−d
+ λ, (6)
which is the “convolution” between the transmission power
P
t
and the ratio as the average number of channel output
Fig. 2. Illustration of the stochastic ISI channel.
photons per slot power α
d
,for0≤ d ≤ D. The model (4)
can be treated as a stochastic ISI channel model,asshown
in Fig. 2. The term “stochastic” implies that the mean of the
signal component
D
d=0
v
t−d,d
of the received signal u
t
is
the convolution between the transmission power P
t
and the
ratio α
d
.
2) Statistical Independence of v
t,d
1
and v
t,d
2
for d
1
= d
2
: So
far we have modeled the channel taps v
t,d
as Poisson random
variables. We need to examine the statistical independence of
v
t,d
for different t and d. Due to the different transmission slots,
the independent assumption on v
t,d
for different t can be well
justified; and the statistical independence of v
t,d
1
and v
t,d
2
for
different d
1
and d
2
can be justified by the independent receiving
events in different time slots.
The statistical independence can also be justified based on
the binomial distribution which can be approximated by Pois-
son distribution. The readers can refer to Appendix VI-A for
details.
Therefore, we have the following stochastic properties on
Poisson approximation for the received signal u
t
in (4),
1) v
t−d,d
satisfies the Poisson distribution with mean value
α
d
P
t−d
;
2) for different t, v
t,d
are statistically independent of each
other; and for fixed t, v
t,d
for 0 ≤ d ≤ D are statistically
independent of each other.
III. P
ILOT-BASED CHANNEL PARAMETER ESTIMATION
Note that, according to the system block diagram shown in
Fig. 1, the channel estimation provides the estimated channel
state information to the subsequent processing blocks. The
channel parameters needed to be estimated are the ratio be-
tween the transmission power and mean value of Poisson dis-
tribution {α
d
}
D
d=0
for the LTI-Poisson channel. In this work, we
consider pilot-based channel estimation , wh ere the transmitter
sends known pilots to the receiver, and the receiver performs
channel estimation based on the number of received photons
in each slot. We adopt least-squares (LS) and correlation bank
(CB) estimation, for the parameters {α
d
}
D
d=0
.
We construct the pilots using a length-T “on and off” pi-
lot sequence with some pattern. In each slot 1 ≤ t ≤ T,the
transmitter either transmits certain number of particles N or
using a fixed power P (on), or it does not transmit (off).
Let z
t
∈{0, 1},1≤ t ≤ T, denote the indicator on whether the