Experimental study on 1×4 real-time SIMO diversity reception scheme for a ultraviolet communication system

Abstract

We firstly applied diversity reception technology to a real-time none-light-of-sight (NLOS) ultraviolet (UV) communication system based on a 9.3mW LED array. Field experiment with 4 receivers (Rxs) achieves bit error rate (BER) improvement, and related conclusions on single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) UV system design are given. Innovatively, the correlation characteristics in UV channel are studied according to measurements of two branches. Experiment result shows that once the transmission distance goes beyond 20m, the value of correlation coefficient remains to be less than 0.4, in which case the Rx branches can be considered to be fading independently, thus achieving diversity gain for the system.