Time-Gated Photon Counting Receivers for Optical Wireless Communication

Photon counting detectors such as single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays can be employed to achieve reliable optical wireless communication at power limited regimes. However, SPAD-based receivers suffer from significant dead-time induced intersymbol interference (ISI) especially when the incident photon rate is relatively high and dead time comparable or even larger than symbol duration, i.e., sub-dead-time regime. In this work, we propose a novel time-gated SPAD receiver mitigate ISI effects improve performance. When operated in gated mode, activated deactivated well-defined intervals. We investigate statistics of detected count for proposed receiver. It demonstrated that gate-ON interval optimized best bit error (BER) Our extensive performance analysis illustrates superiority over traditional free-running terms BER data tolerance background light.