Symbol Detection in Avalanche Photodiode Based Optical Receiver

The paper deals with OOK (on-off keying) symbol detection in additive white Gaussian noise. In the case of avalanche photodiode (APD) based receiver the optimum threshold voltage for symbol detection varies with received signal power, avalanche multiplication gain and excess noise factor. Since the optimum threshold is complex to implement, a simpler criterion for symbol detection is usually used. Although some strategies of threshold evaluation show an inconsiderable sensitivity loss, they are often used because of their simplicity