Effects of the Multiplicative SPAD Noise on the Diffusion Adaptive Networks with Noisy VLC Links

Abstract

The visible light communication (VLC) technology has been gathering attention recently and as the emerging systems and appliances in this technology are still new, their behavior and performance issues must be taken into the consideration as much as possible. This paper aims to fully model the noise that is emanating from the usage of the Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) in the VLC systems. This noise is either modeled with the sub-Poisson or Gaussian plus sub-Poisson distributions. These noise models are then applied to the diffusion adaptive networks to show the real-world impact of the VLC noisy links on their performances. The radio noisy link impacts have been investigated on the performance of the diffusion adaptive networks, however, the effects of the optical link noise on their performances is the contribution of this paper. Also, using the realistic and precise models for the optical noise is another novelty in this paper. The results show that the diffusion network can be implemented using VLC appliances and the existence of the SPAD noise will not hinder the convergence of this network.