Quality Metrics and Reliability Analysis of Laser Communication System

Beam wandering is the main cause for major power loss in laser communication. To analyse this prerequisite at our environment, a 155 Mbps data transmission experimental setup is built with necessary optoelectronic components for the link range of 0.5 km at an altitude of 15.25 m. A neuro-controller is developed inside the FPGA and used to stabilise the received beam at the centre of detector plane. The Q-factor and bit error rate variation profiles are calculated using the signal statistics obtained from the eye-diagram. The performance improvements on the laser communication system due to the incorporation of beam wandering mitigation control are investigated and discussed in terms of various communication quality assessment key parameters.

Introduction to free space optical (FSO) communications

The demand for high bandwidth and secure communication is increasing. Free space optical (FSO) wireless communications technology could be one possible alternative option to the RF technologies that can be adopted in certain applications to unlock the bandwidth bottleneck issue, specifically in the last mile access networks, between mobile base stations in RF cellular wireless networks, and for radio over fiber; and over the last decade, we have seen growing research and development activities in FSO communications in the field of high data rate wireless technology applications as well as the emergence of commercial systems