Deep Learning Aided Signal Detection for SPAD-based Underwater Optical Wireless Communications

In underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems, using single photon avalanche photondiode (SPAD) as the detector can improve the transmission distance. However, the signal detection for SPAD-based systems is greatly challenged by the complex optical channel characteristics and SPAD nonlinear distortion. To address this issue, a novel deep learning aided signal detection scheme is proposed in this paper. By exploiting the physical mechanism and prior expert knowledge of the signal processing, a two-connected multilayer perception (MLP) network is integrated into the receiver. The first subnetwork is regarded as a channel compensation block while the second one works as a demodulator. With sophisticated numerical optical channel model and SPAD non-Poisson model, large amounts of training data are utilized to train the proposed model offline. Afterwards, the online data are recovered with the trained network. Simulation results verify that significant bit error ratio (BER) improvement can be achieved with the proposed scheme.