Fault Detection and Bit-Error Rate Diagnostics in Optical Wireless Links Using Edge-AI

Abstract

Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) systems provide high-bandwidth, spatially secure, and RF-interference-free digital transmission. However, direct free-space optical links suffer from extreme sensitivity to line-of-sight disruptions, optical attenuation, high ambient light saturation, and transmitter-receiver misalignment. Traditional channel diagnostic frameworks rely on external computing nodes or cloud-based processing, which introduces severe diagnostic latency and reduces edge node autonomy. This paper presents an autonomous, self-diagnosing optical wireless receiver node that integrates physical-layer signal telemetry extraction with an on-device TinyML classification engine. Built around an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, the receiver recovers 1000 bit/s On-Off Keying (OOK) digital payloads using a 5-sample majority voting mechanism while concurrently extracting real-time channel features: Bit Error Rate (BER), received signal voltage (Vsignal), Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNRdB), and ambient light baseline (Lambient). Evaluated against a Random Forest baseline (77.22% accuracy) and a floating-point neural network (78.48% accuracy), a post-training INT8 quantized TensorFlow Lite Micro model occupying only 3.32 kB of SRAM runs directly on the receiver firmware. The quantized model achieves 74.68% overall accuracy across four distinct operational conditions: normal transmission, optical filter attenuation, ambient light interference, and severe obstruction/misalignment. On-device deployment tests confirm real-time, deterministic fault classification, establishing a practical approach for self-aware optical IoT nodes.