IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 24, NO.

22, NOVEMBER 15, 2012 2035

Performance Improvement of OOK Free-Space
Optical Communication Systems by Coherent
Detection and Dynamic Decision Threshold
in Atmospheric Turbulence Conditions
Zixiong Wang, Wen-De Zhong, Senior Member, IEEE, and Changyuan Yu, Member, IEEE
AbstractIn this letter, we analyze the performance improve-
ment of onoff-keying free-space optical communication systems
in atmospheric turbulence conditions due to coherent detection
and the dynamic decision threshold (DDT) scheme. Our analyt-
ical results show that the DDT scheme provides a 5.7-dB power
reduction for achieving a bit error rate of 10
3
compared with
the conventional xed decision threshold scheme. In addition,
the improvement achieved by the DDT scheme is related to the
strength of amplitude and phase uctuations, not to the power
of the local oscillator.
Index TermsAtmospheric turbulence, coherent detection,
dynamic decision threshold, free-space optical (FSO).
I. INTRODUCTION
F
REE-SPACE optical (FSO) communication is promis-
ing for short range communication systems [1][3].
However, due to the random changes of refractive index [4],
[5], the light intensity and phase uctuates when optical signal
propagates through the atmospheric turbulence channel. The
intensity and phase uctuations are called as scintillation and
aberrations, respectively, which deteriorate the FSO communi-
cation system performance [6]. Statistical models to describe
scintillation have been extensively studied, such as Gamma-
Gamma and log-normal distributions [7]. However, those
distributions do not consider the phase distortion. Recently,
Belmonte and Kahn have proposed a statistical model to rep-
resent both the amplitude uctuation that follows log-normal
distribution and phase uctuation that follows Gaussian distri-
bution [6], which has aroused researchers interests [8], [9].
Coherent detection has been demonstrated to suppress
scintillation effectively [5]. Coherent on-off keying (OOK)
FSO communication system is easy to be implemented
and does not need additional algorithm in digital signal
processing (DSP) to recover phase information when the
received signal is detected. In conventional coherent OOK
Manuscript received April 24, 2012; revised August 24, 2012; accepted
September 8, 2012. Date of publication September 12, 2012; date of current
version October 31, 2012.
Z. Wang and W.-D. Zhong are with the School of Electrical and Electronic
Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 637553, Singapore (e-mail:
e080008@e.ntu.edu.sg; ewdzhong@ntu.edu.sg).
C. Yu is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineer-
ing, National University of Singapore, 117576, Singapore, and also with
the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research, 138632, Singapore (e-mail:
eleyc@nus.edu.sg).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LPT.2012.2218652
FSO system, a xed decision threshold (FDT) is given accord-
ing to all the detected signals. However, this scheme induces
erroneous judgment when deep fading occurs. In order to
further mitigate scintillation, we introduced a dynamic deci-
sion threshold (DDT) scheme to coherent FSO communication
systems [10], which is based on the fact that scintillation is a
slow fading process with a coherence time in the order of mil-
lisecond [11]. Specically, after being collected by the receive
aperture, the optical signal is detected section by section. In
each section with duration of sub-millisecond, a particular
decision threshold is set according to the preamble amplitude.
However, the phase uctuation was not included in [10]. In
this work, we have considered both the amplitude and phase
uctuations in atmospheric turbulence conditions. Our studies
show that in the coherent OOK FSO communication system,
a 5.7 dB power reduction for achieving bit error rate (BER)
of 10
3
can be achieved in the DDT scheme compared with
the FDT scheme when the scintillation index (SI) is 1.0 and
the number of compensated mode is 1. Results also show that
the power reduction brought by the DDT scheme is associated
with the strength of atmospheric turbulence and the wavefront
compensation, not with the local oscillator (LO) power.
II. CHANNEL MODEL
When light wave propagates through an atmospheric turbu-
lence channel, its intensity uctuates and phase varies. The
received signals eld at the receive aperture can be expressed
by [6],
E
s
(t ) = A
s
(t )ex p[j (
s
t +
s
)]ex p( j ) (1)
where A
s
(t ) represents the modulating signal;
s
and
s
are
the carriers frequency and phase, respectively; and denote
the log-normal amplitude uctuation and Gaussian phase
variation with variances of
2

and
2

, respectively. Coherent
detection is applied to improve the system performance,
where the polarization states of the received optical signal
and local oscillator are assumed to be identical by using
polarization controller [12]. The LOs eld is given by
E
LO
(t ) = A
LO
ex p[j (
LO
t +
LO
)] (2)
where A
LO
,
LO
,
LO
represent the amplitude, frequency, and
the phase of the local oscillator, respectively. Hence, the elec-
trical signal at the output of photo-detector (PD) is given by
x(t ) = 2R
_
P
S
(t )I P
LO
cos(
I F
t +
S

LO
) + n (3)
10411135/$31.00 2012 IEEE
2036 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 24, NO. 22, NOVEMBER 15, 2012
where
I F
=
LO

S
is the intermediate frequency, R is the
PDs responsivity, n represents the additive white Gaussian
noise (AWGN) which consists of both thermal noise and shot
noise, and I represents the fading intensity. P
LO
and P
S
denote
the powers of LO and received signal without turbulence,
respectively. Note that the direct current component at the
output of PD has been blocked. The mean value of fading
intensity is expressed as I =
2
r
+
2
r
+
2
i
[6], where

r
= ex p[(
2

+
2

)/2] (4a)

2
r
= [1 + ex p(2
2

) 2ex p(
2

)]/(2N) (4b)

2
i
= [1 ex p(2
2

)]/(2N). (4c)
In (4a-4c), N represents the number of statistically inde-
pendent cells in the receive aperture [6], which is described
as N = {1.09(r
0
/D)
2
[6/5, 1.08(D/r
0
)
5/3
]}
1
, where D
denotes the diameter of receiver aperture, r
0
represents the
wavefront coherence diameter, and (, ) is the lower incom-
plete gamma function. The variance of log-normal amplitude

is related to SI
2
I
[6], [9], where
2
I
= ex p(4
2

) 1.
The variance of Gaussian phase
2

after modal compensation

is
2

= C
J
(D/r
0
)
5/3
, where coefcient C
J
is determined by
the number ( J) of Zernike terms [13], which are corrected by
the active modal compensation of the receiver [6], [9]. Hence,
the statistical model of fading intensity I can be described by
the modied Rician distribution [6],
f (I )=
1+K
I
ex p
_

K I +(1+K)I
I
_
I
0
_
_
2
_
(1+K)K I
I
_
_
(5)
where I
0
() is the modied Bessel function of the
rst kind of the order of zero and parameter K =
_

2
r
+
2
i
+
2
r
[
4
r
+2
2
r
(
2
i

2
r
)(
2
i

2
r
)
2
]
1/2
1
_
1
.
III. PRINCIPLE OF DYNAMIC DECISION
THRESHOLD SCHEME
In conventional OOK FSO communication system, after
receiving the optical signal, an FDT is generated to distinguish
data 1 and 0 so that the minimum bit error rate is obtained,
as shown in Fig. 1(a). We assume that the channel state
information (CSI) is unavailable [14] at the receiver side and
data 1 and 0 are transmitted equally. The BER performance
with FDT scheme is given by [14],
P
e
=
1
2
_
1
2
er f c
_
I
t h
_
2
2
n
_
+
_

0
1
2
er f c
_
I I
t h
_
2
2
n
_
f (I ) d I
_
(6)
where I
t h
is the FDT determined by setting the likelihood
function at unity value [14],
2
n
is the variance of AWGN,
er f c() is the complementary error function and the PDs
responsivity R is assumed to be unity.
The scintillation induces time-variant fading to the optical
signal, although such fading varies slowly with a coherence
time in the order of millisecond [11]. The FDT scheme will
lead to erroneous judgment when the detected electrical signals
fall below this threshold. As shown in Fig. 1(a), due to the deep
fading, in the second section all the bits 1 that are below
Fig. 1. (a) FDT and (b) DDT scheme. Red dashed line: decision threshold.
Sec: section.
the threshold are detected wrongly to be bits 0. Since the
scintillation is a slow fading process, millions of bits will be
detected wrongly in a high speed FSO communication system.
The DDT scheme could be employed to overcome this
problem, therefore to improve the BER performance. More
specically, as shown in Fig. 1(b), the FSO signal is detected
section by section. The duration of each section is in the
order of sub-millisecond, which is smaller than the channel
coherence time. Hence in each detection section, only the
AWGN would affect the detected signal when the DDT
scheme is employed, where an appropriate decision threshold
is provided for signal detection by monitoring the 200 ns
preamble, which is normal for a burst mode receiver. Note
that unlike the burst mode receiver there is no trans-impedance
amplier or limited amplier in the DDT scheme. The average
BER for coherent detection with the DDT scheme is given by,
P
e
=
_

0
Q[
_
(E
b
/N
0
)I
2
] f (I ) d I (7)
where E
b
/N
0
is the energy per bit to noise power spectral
density ratio in AWGN channel, and Q[
_
(E
b
/N
0
)I
2
] repre-
sents the BER performance of the unipolar OOK signal in
each detection-section in terms of Q-function Q().
IV. PERFORMANCE OF COHERENT OOK FSO SYSTEMS
WITH DYNAMIC DECISION THRESHOLD SCHEME
In the numerical study, we consider that a 10.7 Gbit/s
OOK optical signal with forward error correction (FEC) code
propagates through the atmospheric turbulence channel. The
BER of 10
3
is set as the benchmark, since under this BER
error free transmission could be achieved by applying FEC
code. We also assume that: (i ) the noise bandwidth is equal to
the data rate; (i i ) the receive apertures diameter D is equal
to the wavefront coherence diameter r
0
.
The BER performances for different detection schemes are
shown in Fig. 2, where the LO power is 5 dBm, the number ( J)
of compensated mode at the receiver is 1 and the SI is 1.0.
Note that SI of 1.0 corresponds to Rytov variance of 0.69,
which represents the weak turbulence condition without
considering the phase uctuation [7], [15], [16]. In non-
coherent detection under the FDT scheme, the received opti-
cal power required to achieve BER of 10
3
is 2.7 dBm.
In coherent detection with 5 dBm LO, the received optical
powers required for achieving the same BER are 23.9 dBm
and 29.6 dBm under the FDT and DDT schemes, respec-
tively. Hence, the power reduction by coherent detection is
26.6 dB compared with non-coherent detection, and the DDT
scheme provides a further power reduction of 5.7 dB.
WANG et al.: PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OF OOK FSO COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS 2037
Fig. 2. BER performances under different detection schemes. LO = 5 dBm.
SI = 1.0.
(c)
(b)
(a)
Fig. 3. Power reduction obtained by the DDT scheme in coherent detection
to achieve a BER of 10
3
under different LO powers. (a) J = 1. (b) J = 2.
(c) J = 4.
Fig. 3 shows the power reduction to achieve BER of 10
3
in
coherent detection with the DDT scheme under different LO
powers, scintillation indices, and numbers ( J) of compensated
modes. We nd that for a given SI and a given number of
compensated modes, the power reduction is almost identical
under different LO powers (5 dBm, 0 dBm and 5 dBm).
Although the required optical power to achieve BER of 10
3
is reduced as the LO power increases, the power reduction due
to the DDT scheme is not affected by the LO power, but is
determined by the strength of amplitude and phase uctuation
in terms of SI and the number ( J) of compensated modes,
respectively.
From Fig. 3 we see that for a given SI, the power reduction
decreases as the number ( J) of compensated modes grows.
For example, when SI is 0.1, the power reductions are 5.7 dB
and 0.8 dB for J being 1 and 4, respectively. We also
nd that when J is 1, the power reductions under different
scintillation indices are almost identical, because in this case
the strength of phase uctuation is dominant. However, when
J is 2 or 4, i.e., phase uctuation is less severe, the effect
of amplitude uctuation in terms of SI on power reduction
becomes more obvious. Consequently, the power reduction by
the DDT scheme increases as SI grows.
V. CONCLUSION
In this letter, we investigated the improvement of BER
performance in coherent FSO communication system by DDT
scheme where the received signal is detected section by
section. A 5.7 dB power reduction to achieve BER of 10
3
is obtained by using the DDT scheme when the SI is 1.0 and
the number of compensated mode is 1. It is shown that the
power reduction by the DDT scheme in coherent detection is
determined by the strength of amplitude and phase uctuation,
not by the LO power.
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