Abstract
In this paper, a comprehensive analytical approach is presented for modeling the counting statistics of active quenching and passive quenching single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors. It is shown that, unlike ideal photon counting receiver for which the detection process is described by a Poisson arrival process, photon counts in practical SPAD receivers do not follow a Poisson distribution and are highly affected by the dead time caused by the quenching circuit. Using the concepts of renewal theory, the exact expressions for the probability distribution and moments (mean and variance) of photocounts in the presence of dead time are derived for both active quenching and passive quenching SPADs. The derived probability distributions are validated through Monte Carlo simulations and it is demonstrated that the moments match with the existing empirical models for the moments of SPAD photocounts. Furthermore, an optical communication system with on-off keying and binary pulse position modulation is considered and the bit error performance of the system for different dead time values and background count levels is evaluated.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 4043-4058 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Communications |
| Volume | 66 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| Early online date | 12 Apr 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 14 Sept 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
Manuscript received August 11, 2017; revised January 9, 2018 and March 12, 2018; accepted March 18, 2018. Date of publication April 12, 2018; date of current version September 14, 2018. Professor H. Haas acknowledges support by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under Grant EP/K008757/1. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was H. Wymeersch. (Corresponding author: Elham Sarbazi.) The authors are with the Li-Fi Research and Development Centre, Institute for Digital Communications, School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, U.K. (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]).
Keywords
- active quenching
- binary pulse position modulation (BPPM)
- dead time
- on-off keying (OOK)
- optical wireless communications
- passive quenching
- photon counting
- single photon avalanche diode (SPAD)