Hybrid POF/VLC link with M-PAM and MLP equaliser

We propose and experimentally demonstrate for the first time, M-PAM transmission through a hybrid POF/VLC downlink using off-the-shelf components. The link consists of 60 m SI-POF and 1 m VLC and with the aid of a blue filter, the link has an effective bandwidth of 17 MHz. Conventional adaptive decision feedback equaliser (DFE) and multi-layer perceptron DFE (MLP-DFE) are also implemented and their bit error rate (BER) performances are measured and compared with offline (MATLAB) implementation. For the conventional DFE, the achievable data rates at a BER of 10−3 are 60, 91.5 and 80 Mbps for M = 2, 4 and 8 respectively. Higher data rates are achieved for MLP-DFE at the same BER of 10−3 as we obtained 61.5, 95 and 85 Mbps for M = 2, 4 and 8 respectively. Thus, we show that MLP-DFE offers superior BER performance than conventional DFE for higher PAM level.