In recent years, free space optical (FSO) communication has gained significant importance owing to its unique features: large bandwidth, license free spectrum, high data rate, easy and quick deployability, less power, and low mass requirements. FSO communication uses optical carrier in the near infrared band to establish either terrestrial links within the Earth’s atmosphere or inter-satellite/deep space links or ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground links. It also finds its applications in remote sensing, radio astronomy, military, disaster recovery, last mile access, backhaul for wireless cellular networks, and many more. However, despite of great potential of FSO communication, its performance is limited by the adverse effects (viz., absorption, scattering, and turbulence) of the atmospheric channel. Out of these three effects, the atmospheric turbulence is a major challenge that may lead to serious degradation in the bit error rate performance of the system and make the communication link infeasible. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on various challenges faced by FSO communication system for ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. It also provides details of various performance mitigation techniques in order to have high link availability and reliability. The first part of this paper will focus on various types of impairments that pose a serious challenge to the performance of optical communication system for ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. The latter part of this paper will provide the reader with an exhaustive review of various techniques both at physical layer as well as at the other layers (link, network, or transport layer) to combat the adverse effects of the atmosphere. It also uniquely presents a recently developed technique using orbital angular momentum for utilizing the high capacity advantage of optical carrier in case of space-based and near-Earth optical communication links. This survey provides the reader with comprehensive details on the use of space-based optical backhaul links in order to provide high capacity and low cost backhaul solutions.

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Optical Communication in Space: Challenges and Mitigation Techniques

In recent years, free space optical communication has gained significant importance owing to its unique features: large bandwidth, license-free spectrum, high data rate, easy and quick deployability, less power and low mass requirements. FSO communication uses the optical carrier in the near infrared band to establish either terrestrial links within the Earth's atmosphere or inter-satellite or deep space links or ground-to-satellite or satellite-to-ground links. However, despite the great potential of FSO communication, its performance is limited by the adverse effects viz., absorption, scattering, and turbulence of the atmospheric channel. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on various challenges faced by FSO communication system for ground-to-satellite or satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. It also provides details of various performance mitigation techniques in order to have high link availability and reliability. The first part of the paper will focus on various types of impairments that pose a serious challenge to the performance of optical communication system for ground-to-satellite or satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. The latter part of the paper will provide the reader with an exhaustive review of various techniques both at physical layer as well as at the other layers i.e., link, network or transport layer to combat the adverse effects of the atmosphere. It also uniquely presents a recently developed technique using orbital angular momentum for utilizing the high capacity advantage of the optical carrier in case of space-based and near-Earth optical communication links. This survey provides the reader with comprehensive details on the use of space-based optical backhaul links in order to provide high-capacity and low-cost backhaul solutions.

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Add this article to private library Remove from private library Submit corrections to this record View record in the new ADS The book presents an introductory treatment of digital and analog communication systems with emphasis on digital systems. Attention is given to the following topics: systems and signal analysis, random signal theory, information and channel capacity, baseband data transmission, analog signal transmission, noise in analog communication systems, digital carrier modulation schemes, error control coding, and the digital transmission of analog signals. Bibtex entry for this abstract Preferred format for this abstract

Digital and analog communication systems

Light-emitting diodes constitute a low-cost choice for optical transmitters in medium-bit-rate optical links. An example for the latter is local-area networks. However, one of the disadvantageous properties of light-emitting diodes is their nonlinear characteristic, which may limit the data transmission performance of the system, especially in the case of multiple subcarrier modulation, which is starting to attract attention in various applications, such as visible-light communications and data transmission over polymer optical fibers. In this paper, the influence of the nonlinear transfer function of the light-emitting diodes on discrete multitone modulation is studied. The transfer function describes the dependence of the emitted optical power on the driving current. Analytical expressions for an idealized link were derived, and these equations allow the estimation of the power of the noise-like, nonlinear crosstalk between the orthogonal subcarriers. The crosstalk components of the quadrature and in-phase subcarrier components were found to be independent and approximately normally distributed. Using these results, the influence of light-emitting-diode nonlinearity on the performance of the system was investigated. The main finding was that systems using a small number of subcarriers and/or high QAM level exhibit a large signal-to-noise-ratio penalty due to the nonlinear crosstalk. The model was applied to systems with white and resonant-cavity light-emitting diodes. It is shown that the nonlinearity may severely limit the performance of the system, particularly in the case of resonant-cavity light-emitting diodes, which exhibit a strong nonlinear behavior.

Impact of Nonlinear LED Transfer Function on Discrete Multitone Modulation: Analytical Approach

In this letter, we introduce a detection technique based on differential signaling scheme for outdoor free space optical communications. This method requires no channel state information (CSI) and does not suffer from the computational load compared with the conventional receivers, where adjusting dynamically the detection threshold level (either based on CSI knowledge, or by using pilots) leads to increased computational time and reduced link throughput. This letter shows that the performance of the proposed technique only depends on the correlation of propagating optical beams. Especially under highly correlated-channels condition the fluctuation of the detection threshold level in the receiver is significantly small. We also show experimentally that under weak turbulence regime the variance of detection threshold level reduces for the correlated channel.

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FSO Detection Using Differential Signaling in Outdoor Correlated-Channels Condition

The performance of the dual header pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM) scheme in indoor diffuse optical wireless environments is examined. The power requirement and penalty due to intersymbol interference is analysed using the ceiling-bounce model and results are compared with other modulation schemes such as PPM and DPIM. It is shown that for given parameters, DH-PIM requires marginally higher optical power compared with PPM and DPIM, but it supports the same bit rate with much lower bandwidth requirement.

Dual header pulse interval modulation for dispersive indoor optical wireless communication systems

The performance of dual header pulse interval modulation in distortion-free optical wireless channels is examined in terms of error performance, power requirement and achievable bit rate. Complete derivations of the slot and packet error rates, optical power and bandwidth requirements are presented. The calculated results are confirmed by computer simulation of the proposed scheme. The performance of DH-PIM is compared with PPM, PIM and OOK modulation schemes. It is shown that DH-PIM offers improved error performance compared with OOK and PIM, but is marginally inferior to PPM.

Error performance of dual header pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM) in optical wireless communications

Fluorescent lamps introduce a periodic interference signal in optical wireless receivers, which has the potential to degrade link performance severely. Usually, electrical high-pass filtering is employed to mitigate the effects of this interference, but this results in baseline wander or intersymbol interference. Digital pulse-interval modulation (DPIM) is a modulation technique which has been shown to be suitable for deployment in optical-wireless-communication systems. The effect of baseline wander on systems employing DPIM is examined. A new expression is given for the slot autocorrelation function of DPIM and, from this, the power spectral density is calculated. The error performance of DPIM, as a function of high-pass filter (HPF) cut-on frequency, is compared with the more established techniques of on-off keying using nonreturn-to-zero signalling (OOK) and pulse-position modulation (PPM), using both numerical analysis and computer simulation.

Baseline-wander effects on systems employing digital pulse-interval modulation

12 In this paper, we present a study of dual header-pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM) scheme for optical wireless communications. System theory and code properties of DH-PIM are discussed and expressions for the power spectral density, slow and packet error rates and optical power requirements are presented. The problem of baseline wander is also studied. The performance of DH-PIM is compared with other modulation schemes such as on-off keying (OOK), pulse position modulation (PPM), differential pulse position modulation and digital pulse interval modulation. We show that, DH-PIM offers higher bit rate and has a built-in frame synchronization capability. For a simple threshold detector receiver, it offers improved error performance compared with OOK, but marginally inferior performance compared with PPM. The optimum system performance in terms of optical power and bandwidth requirements is achieved at bit resolution of 5.

Performance of dual header-pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM) for optical wireless communication systems

SUMMARY This paper assesses the performance of dual header pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM) over indoor optical wireless systems. DH-PIM being anisochronous scheme offers a built-in symbol synchronization capability. Theoretical and simulation results demonstrate that DH-PIM offers shorter symbol length, improved transmission rate and bandwidth requirement and a comparable power spectral density profile compared with digital pulse interval modulation (DPIM) and pulse position modulation (PPM) schemes. It is shown that DH-PIM2; with wider pulse duration is the preferred option when the available channel bandwidth is limited and higher optical power is tolerable. Whereas DH-PIM1; with narrower pulse width, exhibits comparable power requirements but a marginally higher bandwidth compared with DPIM, and is also more bandwidth efficient than PPM at the cost of increased power requirement. However, at higher bit resolutions, i.e. M57; DH-PIM1 is both bandwidth and power efficient compared with PPM. Error rate analysis show that DH-PIM offers improved packet error rate compared with on-off-keying (OOK) and DPIM, but marginally inferior as compared with PPM. The power requirement and penalty due to intersymbol interference for non-dispersive and dispersive channels is analysed and the results show that for given parameters, DH-PIM requires marginally higher optical power compared with PPM and DPIM, but it supports the same bit rate at much less bandwidth requirement. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

R. McLaughlin

Papers

Dual header pulse interval modulation for dispersive indoor optical wireless communication systems

Error performance of dual header pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM) in optical wireless communications

Baseline-wander effects on systems employing digital pulse-interval modulation

Performance of dual header-pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM) for optical wireless communication systems

Indoor optical wireless systems employing dual header pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM)