Free-Space Optical Communications Using on-off Keying and Source Information Transformation

• Published in: Journal of lightwave technology Vol. 34; no. 11; pp. 2601 - 2609
• Main Authors: Luanxia Yang, Bingcheng Zhu, Cheng, Julian, Holzman, Jonathan F.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptive systems; Bit error rate; Channels; Complexity theory; Exact solutions; Fading channels; Free-space optical communication; On-Off Keying; Optical transmitters; Photodetectors; Probability density function; Probability density functions; Receivers; Transformations; Turbulent flow; pilots; free-space optical communications; detection threshold; Channel estimation
• ISSN: 0733-8724; 1558-2213
• DOI: 10.1109/JLT.2016.2542203

Free-space optical communication using ON-OFF keying (OOK) and source information transformation is proposed. It is shown that the source information transformation allows the proposed system to detect the OOK signal without requiring the knowledge of instantaneous channel state information and the probability density function (pdf) of the turbulence model. Analytical expressions are derived for the pdf of the detection threshold, and an upper bound is obtained on the average bit error rate (BER). Numerical studies show that the proposed system can achieve comparable performance to the idealized adaptive detection system, with a greatly reduced level of implementation complexity and a signal-to-noise ratio performance loss of only 1.8 dB at a BER of 1 × 10 -9 for a lognormal turbulence channel with σ = 0.25.