Polar-Coded Transmission over 7.8-km Terrestrial Free-Space Optical Links

• Published in: Photonics Vol. 10; no. 4; p. 462
• Main Authors: Fujita, Shingo, Okamoto, Eiji, Takenaka, Hideki, Endo, Hiroyuki, Fujiwara, Mikio, Kitamura, Mitsuo, Shimizu, Ryosuke, Sasaki, Masahide, Toyoshima, Morio
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.04.2023
• Subjects: Atmospheric turbulence; channel equalization; Codes; Communication networks; Decoding; Error correcting codes; Error correction; Error correction & detection; Experiments; Field tests; Free space optics; Free-space optical communication; Laser beams; Lasers; Low density parity check codes; low-density parity-check code; Optical properties; Performance degradation; polar code; Satellites; transmission experiments; Wireless communications; Japan
• ISSN: 2304-6732; 2304-6732
• DOI: 10.3390/photonics10040462

Free-space optical (FSO) communications can offer high-capacity transmission owing to the properties of the laser beams. However, performance degradation caused by atmospheric turbulence is an urgent issue. Recently, the application of polar codes, which can provide capacity-achieving error-correcting performance with low computational cost for decoding, to FSO communications has been studied. However, long-distance and real-field experiments have not been conducted in these studies. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to present the experimental results of polar-coded transmission over 7.8-km FSO links. Using experimental data, we investigated the performance of polar codes over atmospheric channels, including their superiority to regular low-density parity-check codes. We expect that our results will offer a path toward the application of polar codes in high-speed optical communication networks including satellites.