Performance analysis of pilot-based OFDM channel estimation for hybrid PLC&VLC system

Visible light communication (VLC) has been a research hotspot for broad bandwidth, high speed, and anti-interference. Power line communication (PLC) has the advantages of low cost and flexible access, which is connected and combined with VLC to be a hybrid communication system. We set up a communication system model of PLC&VLC based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation, and investigated four pilot-based channel estimation methods. Least squares (LS) and singular value decomposition (SVD) criterion are both insensitive to block-type pilot space. By contrast, we found that discrete fourier transform (DFT)-based technique can improve the performance of LS combined with linear interpolation, and the performance of SVD combined with linear interpolation is similar to that of SVD combined with DFT-based interpolation. Considering the performance and complexity of algorithms, SVD combined with linear interpolation is the best choice of the four methods.