Performance analysis of free space optical communication in open-atmospheric turbulence conditions with beam wandering compensation control

Abstract

Among various atmospheric effects, beam wandering is the main cause for the major power loss in free space optical communication (FSOC) which cannot be resolved without incorporating the beam wandering compensation (BWC) control. To prove this prerequisite, 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 field programmable gate array and used to stabilise the received beam at the centre of the detector plane so as to perfectly couple the power in the bucket to the optical detector. 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 FSOC system due to the incorporation of BWC control are investigated and discussed in terms of various communication quality assessment key parameters.