A Comprehensive Model for Performance Analysis of APD-based FSO Systems using M-PPM Signaling in Atmospheric Turbulence

In this paper, a model of Gaussian pulse propagation over atmospheric turbulence channel is used to comprehensively analyze the performance of APD-based free-space optical communication (FSO) systems using M-PPM signaling. This model is able to simultaneously take into account all effects of atmospheric turbulence including attenuation, intensity fluctuation, and pulse broadening, which has not been considered in previous works. In addition, the impacts of APD shot noise, background noise, and thermal noise are included in our analysis. The numerical results show that the main factor that limits the system performance is intensity fluctuation. However, when M is large enough, optical pulse is so short that the effect of pulse broadening becomes dominant. By using APD receiver, bit-error rate is improved significantly. Finally, based on channel capacity, we are able to determine the maximum transmission length of the system

BER Performance of IM/DD FSO System with OOK using APD Receiver

In this paper, the performance of intensity-modulated with direct detection (IM/DD) free space optical (FSO) system using the on-off keying (OOK) and avalanche photodiode (APD) receiver is observed. The gamma-gamma model is used to describe the effect of atmospheric turbulence since it provides good agreement in the wide range of atmospheric conditions. In addition, the same FSO system with equal gain combining applied at the reception is analyzed. After theoretical derivation of the expression for the bit error rate (BER), the numerical integration with previously specified relative calculation error is performed. Numerical results are presented and confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations. The effects of the FSO link and receiver parameters on the BER performance are discussed. The results illustrate that the optimal APD gain in the minimum BER sense depends considerably on the link distance, atmospheric turbulence strength and receiver temperature. In addition, the value of this optimal gain is slightly different in the case of spatial diversity application compared with single channel reception

BER analysis of amplify-and-forward relaying FSO systems using APD receiver over strong atmospheric turbulence channels

In this paper, we theoretically analyze the performance of amplify-and-forward (AF) serial relaying free-space optical (FSO) systems using avalanche photodiodes (APD) and subcarrier quadrature amplitude modulation (SC-QAM) over strong atmospheric turbulence channels modelled by gamma-gamma distribution. Closed-form expression for average bit error rate (BER) of system is theoretically derived talking into account APD shot noise, thermal noise as well as the impact of atmospheric loss and turbulence. The numerical results show that using AF relay stations can extend the transmission distance and help to improve performance of FSO system significantly when compared with the direct transmission. Moreover, the selection of APD gain value is indispensable to the system performance. The proposed system could be achieved the best performance by selecting an optimal APD gain value. In addition, the optimal value of APD gain also significantly depends on various conditions, such as link distance, the number of relay stations and APD receiver noise

Wireless optical communications through the turbulent atmosphere: a review

Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Analytical time-domain model for radio over free space optical (RoFSO) systems considering the scintillation effect

This work was supported by the World-Class University (WCU) Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (R31-10026), and Grant K20901000004-09E0100-00410 funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (MEST).An analytical time-domain model is presented to analyze a radio over free space optical (RoFSO) system considering the scintillation effect with a log-normal distribution. This analytical model uses a dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DD-MZM) and photodetector (PD) for typical optical double sideband (ODSB) and single sideband (OSSB) signals. We show the output current of PD as a function of the summation of each frequency component in time domain. Finally, we calculate the received signal power with respect to the power spectral density (PSD) and derive a closed-form average bit error rate (BER) performance.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Current optical technologies for wireless access

The objective of this paper is to describe recent activities and investigations on free-space optics (FSO) or optical wireless and the excellent results achieved within SatNEx an EU-framework 6th programme and IC 0802 a COST action. In a first part, the FSO technology is briefly discussed. In a second part, we mention some performance evaluation criterions for the FSO. In third part, we briefly discuss some optical signal propagation experiments through the atmosphere by mentioning network architectures for FSO and then discuss the recent investigations in airborne and satellite application experiments for FSO. In part four, we mention some recent investigation results on modelling the FSO channel under fog conditions and atmospheric turbulence. Additionally, some recent major performance improvement results obtained by employing hybrid systems and using some specific modulation and coding schemes are presented

Dual-Pulse Pulse Position Modulation (DPPM) for Deep-Space Optical Communications: Performance and Practicality Analysis

Due to its simplicity and robustness against wavefront distortion, pulse position modulation (PPM) with photon counting detector has been seriously considered for long-haul optical wireless systems. This paper evaluates the dual-pulse case and compares it with the conventional single-pulse case. Analytical expressions for symbol error rate and bit error rate are first derived and numerically evaluated, for the strong, negative-exponential turbulent atmosphere; and bandwidth efficiency and throughput are subsequently assessed. It is shown that, under a set of practical constraints including pulse width and pulse repetition frequency (PRF), dual-pulse PPM enables a better channel utilization and hence a higher throughput than it single-pulse counterpart. This result is new and different from the previous idealistic studies that showed multi-pulse PPM provided no essential information-theoretic gains than single-pulse PPM

Subcarrier intensity modulated free-space optical communication systems

This thesis investigates and analyses the performance of terrestrial free-space optical communication (FSO) system based on the phase shift keying pre-modulated subcarrier intensity modulation (SIM). The results are theoretically and experimentally compared with the classical On-Off keying (OOK) modulated FSO system in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. The performance analysis is based on the bit error rate (BER) and outage probability metrics. Optical signal traversing the atmospheric channel suffers attenuation due to scattering and absorption of the signal by aerosols, fog, atmospheric gases and precipitation. In the event of thick fog, the atmospheric attenuation coefficient exceeds 100 dB/km, this potentially limits the achievable FSO link length to less than 1 kilometre. But even in clear atmospheric conditions when signal absorption and scattering are less severe with a combined attenuation coefficient of less than 1 dB/km, the atmospheric turbulence significantly impairs the achievable error rate, the outage probability and the available link margin of a terrestrial FSO communication system. The effect of atmospheric turbulence on the symbol detection of an OOK based terrestrial FSO system is presented analytically and experimentally verified. It was found that atmospheric turbulence induced channel fading will require the OOK threshold detector to have the knowledge of the channel fading strength and noise levels if the detection error is to be reduced to its barest minimum. This poses a serious design difficulty that can be circumvented by employing phase shift keying (PSK) pre-modulated SIM. The results of the analysis and experiments showed that for a binary PSK-SIM based FSO system, the symbol detection threshold level does not require the knowledge of the channel fading strength or noise level. As such, the threshold level is fixed at the zero mark in the presence or absence of atmospheric turbulence. Also for the full and seamless integration of FSO into the access network, a study of SIM-FSO performance becomes compelling because existing networks already contain subcarrier-like signals such as radio over fibre and cable television signals. The use of multiple subcarrier signals as a means of increasing the throughput/capacity is also investigated and the effect of optical source nonlinearity is found to result in intermodulation distortion. The intermodulation distortion can impose a BER floor of up to 10-4 on the system error performance. In addition, spatial diversity and subcarrier delay diversity techniques are studied as means of ameliorating the effect of atmospheric turbulence on the error and outage performance of SIM-FSO systems. The three spatial diversity linear combining techniques analysed are maximum ratio combining, equal gain combining and selection combining. The system performance based on each of these combining techniques is presented and compared under different strengths of atmospheric turbulence. The results predicted that achieving a 4 km SIM-FSO link length with no diversity technique will require about 12 dB of power more than using a 4 × 4 transmitter/receiver array system with the same data rate in a weak turbulent atmospheric channel. On the other hand, retransmitting the delayed copy of the data once on a different subcarrier frequency was found to result in a gain of up to 4.5 dB in weak atmospheric turbulence channel