10.1364/OE.18.008948">
 

Synergy of Adaptive Thresholds and Multiple Transmitters in Free-space Optical Communication

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-26-2010

Abstract

Laser propagation through extended turbulence causes severe beam spread and scintillation. Airborne laser communication systems require special considerations in size, complexity, power, and weight. Rather than using bulky, costly, adaptive optics systems, we reduce the variability of the received signal by integrating a two-transmitter system with an adaptive threshold receiver to average out the deleterious effects of turbulence. In contrast to adaptive optics approaches, systems employing multiple transmitters and adaptive thresholds exhibit performance improvements that are unaffected by turbulence strength. Simulations of this system with on-off-keying (OOK) showed that reducing the scintillation variations with multiple transmitters improves the performance of low-frequency adaptive threshold estimators by 1-3 dB. The combination of multiple transmitters and adaptive thresholding provided at least a 10 dB gain over implementing only transmitter pointing and receiver tilt correction for all three high-Rytov number scenarios. The scenario with a spherical-wave Rytov number ℛ=0.20 enjoyed a 13 dB reduction in the required SNR for BER’s between 10−5 to 10−3, consistent with the code gain metric. All five scenarios between 0.06 and 0.20 Rytov number improved to within 3 dB of the SNR of the lowest Rytov number scenario.

Comments

© 2010 Optical Society of America. Users may use, reuse, and build upon the article, or use the article for text or data mining, so long as such uses are for non-commercial purposes and appropriate attribution is maintained. All other rights are reserved.

Published under the terms of the under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement and OSA's open access policies.

The "Link to Full Text" on this page opens the full article at the publisher website [HTML]. A PDF of the article is also available from that location.

Source Publication

Optics Express

Share

COinS