Opt Quant Electron (2017)49:184

DOI 10.1007/s11082-017-1019-2

A cost effective 100 Gbps hybrid MDM–OCDMA–FSO

transmission system under atmospheric turbulences

Himali Sarangal1 • Amarpal Singh2 • Jyoteesh Malhotra3 •

Sushank Chaudhary4

Received: 13 January 2017 / Accepted: 7 April 2017

 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017

Abstract FSO or free space optics is a familiar name used in a wide array of applications in the
area of telecommunications. Due to its features of low maintenance cost and deployment time,
most of the applications consider FSO as the alternative solution for appropriately replacing
fiber optics. In this work, we have designed 100 Gbps FSO system by combining mode division
multiplexing (MDM) and optical code multiple access scheme (OCDMA). Ten channels, each
carrying 10 Gbps data, are transported over 8 km FSO link by using MDM of two Laguerre
Gaussian modes and random diagonal codes. Moreover, the performance of proposed MDM–
OCDMA–FSO system is also investigated under atmospheric turbulences.

Keywords Free space optics (FSO)  Mode division multiplexing (MDM)  Laguerre
Gaussian modes (LG)  Random diagonal codes

1 Introduction

In the current age of information technology, free space optics or FSO is considered as a
cutting-edge communication system that can be used for sharing any real-time information
globally from anywhere anytime reliably and securely. FSO integrates features of the
existing optical and wireless fiber communication technologies. In case of optical fiber
communication, FSO includes a high-speed optical carrier that accelerates transmission

& Sushank Chaudhary

sushankchaudhary@gmail.com
1
PTU Kapurthala, Jalandhar, Punjab, India
2
Department of ECE, KCET, Amritsar, Punjab, India
3
Department of Electronics, GNDU RC Jalandhar, Jalandhar, Punjab, India
4
InterNetworks Research Laboratory, School of Computing, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Sintok,
Malaysia

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capacity while using cost-effective optical network (Chaudhary and Amphawan 2014;
Chaudhary et al. 2014). Further, it makes FSO an efficient alternative to new optical fiber
installations in remote and rural areas. Moreover, transmission via FSO links is a secure
process as it features point-to-point laser signals with negligible interception (Khan et al.
2016; Kumar and Teixeira 2016). There are various advantages of using FSO systems for
communication including no fiber optic cables required, low expenses, no security
upgrades, and so on (Khalighi and Uysal 2014). Moreover, FSO system upgrades do not
require RF license. However, the performance of FSO links can be affected by various
atmospheric conditions due to its channels located in the troposphere region (Robinson and
Jasmine 2016; Sinclair et al. 2013). Since atmospheric conditions tend to occur in this
region, modulated light transmitted through FSO links is relatively affected by various
atmospheric parameters including scattering, non-selective scattering, and absorption.
Raindrops in bigger size cause scattering and non-selective scattering whereas atmospheric
gases cause absorption (Basahel et al. 2016; Fadhil et al. 2013). In case of temperate
regions, two of the most prominent weather conditions to affect FSO links are fog and
heavy snow (Esmail et al. 2016).
On the other hand, optical code division multiple access or OCDMA is one of the
prominent developments in the field of optical network systems, which integrates various
types of data traffic and increased bandwidth (Liu 2015). Wireless networks extensively use
code division multiple access (CDMA) as it is secure and efficient. Comprised of the features
of CDMA, OCDMA can transmit data seamlessly which further controls and manages
networks easily. Further, FSO can integrate OCDMA to develop hybrid network for last-mile
access networks without fiber deployment (Jurado-Navas et al. 2016). FSO-OCDMA inte-
gration was first proposed and implemented by Sasaki et al. (2008) which was utilized
mostly for evaluating turbulence effects on OCDMA using temporal or 2D encoding
schemes (Jazayerifar and Salehi 2006; Pham et al. 2010). However, the performance of
OCDMA can be affected greatly due to multiple access interference (MAI) particularly when
it involves many users (Sayed et al. 2014). The current paper proposes mode division
multiplexing (MDM) for reducing the effects of MAI. MDM can be used for enhancing
capacity of optical networks. Users can allocate different modes to transmit over same
channel using MDM, thus reducing spectrum and bandwidth issues. MDM has been used in
FSO systems by various researchers (Amphawan et al. 2014, 2015a, b; Amphawan and
Chaudhary 2015; Milione et al. 2015), yet the area remains unexploited. The current paper
aims to design a cost effective MDM-integrated OCDMA system for transmitting 100 Gbps
data over 8 km FSO channel without using any compensation technique which, to the
author’s best knowledge, was never reported in any work. Laguerre Gaussian (LG) 01 and 02
modes are used for MDM whereas random diagonal (RD) codes are used to design OCDMA
scheme for the proposed FSO system. The rest of paper discusses system description in
section II and results and discussion in section III followed by conclusion in section IV.

2 System description

The simulation configuration of the proposed 10 9 10 hybrid MDM–OCDMA–FSO sys-

tem, simulated in OptiSystemTM V-13 software, is shown in Fig. 1. It uses LG 01 and LG
02 modes—generated by spatial laser with the power of 10 dBm and random diagonal
(RD) encoders—to transmit ten channels each with 10 Gbps non return to zero (NRZ)
modulated data.

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A cost effective 100 Gbps hybrid MDM–OCDMA–FSO transmission… Page 3 of 10 184

Fig. 1 10 9 10 Gbps hybrid MDM-OFDM-FSO transmission system

The LG modes are described mathematically (Ghatak and Thyagarajan 1998) as

  n    2   2  
2r 2 j2j n 2r 2 r pr sinðjnjuÞ; n  0
wm;n ðr; uÞ ¼ Lm exp exp j ð1Þ
w20 w20 w20 kR0 cosðjnjuÞ; n  0

For designing RD encoder, ðN; W; kÞ represent the RD code where N = code length,
W = code weight, and k = in-phase cross correlation. k can also be referred to as
PN
i¼1 xi yi because it combines two different sequences, X ðx1 ; x2 ; . . .; xN ) and Y
ðy1 ; y2 ; . . .; yN ). The ideal in-phase cross correlation is considered as k ¼ 1. In order to
perform RD code for the proposed MDM–OCDMA–FSO system, the code sequence
contains two segments—data and code (Fadhil et al. 2009).
Step 1 data segment A matrix containing a single ‘‘1’’ represents this segment while
keeping the cross correlation zero at data level (k ¼ 1). This segment can be described by
matrix ðK X KÞ, where K is the total number of users. There is a binary coefficient and a basic
zero cross code (weight = 1) in each matrix defined by [Y] where Y1 is represented as
2 3
1 0 0
½Y1 ¼ 4 0 1 0 5 ð2Þ
0 0 1
[Y1] includes ðK  KÞ identity matrices. It is notable that cross correlation between any
two rows will always be counted as zero.
Step 2 code segment This segment is represented with W = 4,
2 3
0 1 1 1 0
½Y2 ¼ 4 1 1 0 0 1 5 ð3Þ
1 0 1 1 0
½Y2 contains two matrices—basic matrix [B] and weight matrix [W]. Basic part is rep-
resented as

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2 3
0 1 1
½B ¼ 4 1 1 0 5 ð4Þ
1 0 1
2 3
1 0
and weight part as [M] matrix = 4 0 1 5 that increases the number of weights. In case of
1 0
2 3
1 0
i ¼ ðW  3Þ and Mi ¼ 4 0 1 5, i refers to the total number of Mi matrix on [M] matrix
1 0
represented as
½M  ¼ ðjM2 jM3 . . . Mi Þ ð5Þ

In case w = 5 (the current paper has used it), the above Eq. (5) i = 2, where ½M  ¼
M1 jM2 is represented as
2 3
1 0 1 0
½M  ¼ 4 0 1 0 1 5 ð6Þ
1 0 1 0

It is notable that the number of users can be increased simultaneously by increasing the
code word length simply by repeating the rows on [M] and [B] matrices. In case of Kth
user, [M] and [B] matrices are represented as
2 3 2 3
0 1 1 0 1
61 1 0 7 61 0 7
6 7 6 7
61 0 1 7 60 1 7
6 7 6 7
½Bð jÞ ¼ 6
6
0 1 1 7 and ½M ð jÞ ¼ 6 1
7 6
0 7
7 ð7Þ
61 1 0 7 60 1 7
6. .. .. 7 6. .. 7
4 .. . . 5 4 .. . 5
aj1 aj2 aj3 aj1 aj2
j refers to the value of Kth user j ¼ 1; 2; . . .; K, where the value of aj can be 0 or 1.
Different wavelength can be used for constructing the RD encoder which is shown in
Table 1 below where the output of the encoders is combined and then transmitted over free
space link.
Free space optics link equation can be expressed mathematically (McCartney 1976) as
d2R
PRecieved ¼ PTransmitted 10aR=10 ð8Þ
ðdT þ hRÞ2
dR represents the receiver aperture diameter, dT is a transmitter aperture diameter, h a beam
divergence, R refers to the range, and a atmospheric attenuation. Performance of the
proposed MDM–OCDMA–FSO system can be evaluated under atmospheric turbulences
by assuming the atmospheric attenuation value with corresponding visibilities as 0.14 dB/
km for clear weather, 9 dB/km for thin fog, 12 dB/km for medium fog, and 16 dB/km for
heavy fog (Kim et al. 2001; Majumdar 2005). At the receiving side, OCDMA channels can
be recovered by using RD decoders while a PIN photo-diode is used for each channel in
order to recover the original transmitted signal.

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 Table 1 Wavelengths used for RD encoders and RD decoders
Users 1550 1550.8 1551.6 1552.4 1553.2 1554 1554.8 1555.6 1556.4 1557.2 1558 1558.8

U1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1
U2 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0
U3 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1
U4 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0
U5 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1
A cost effective 100 Gbps hybrid MDM–OCDMA–FSO transmission…
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3 Results and discussion

This section represents the discussion of results obtained from simulation of proposed
10 9 10 Gbps hybrid MDM–OCDMA–FSO transmission system. Figure 2 represents the
measured bit error rate at receiver side for channel 1 and channel 10. It is shown from
Fig. 1 that the value of BER for channel 1 is computed as 8.37595e-217, 8.34845e-036
and 2.14576e-004, whereas for channel 10, the value of BER is noted as 5.78731e-189,
3.62908e-045 and 2.46982e-003 at FSO transmission link of 4, 6 and 10 km respec-
tively. The measured eye diagrams for channel 1 and channel 10 are shown in Fig. 3.
The measured BER and clear eye diagrams shows that under clear weather conditions,
the FSO link prolongs to 8 km with acceptable SNR.
Figure 4 represents power coupling coefficient (P.C.C) with respect to LP Modes for
LG 01 and LG 02, measured at RD decoder 1 and RD decoder 2. In case of LG 01 mode,
power coupling occurs mainly with azimuthal mode order of 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 while the
largest power is coupled into LP 01 mode followed by LP 11, LP 12, LP 13, LP 14, and LP
15 modes. In case of LG 02 mode, power coupling occurs with azimuthal mode order of 3,
5, 7, and 9 while the largest power is coupled into LP 21 mode followed by LP 22, LP 23,
and LP 24 modes. The power coupling also agrees with the spatial profiles for the gen-
erated LG modes.
Similarly, Fig. 5 shows the evaluation of BER for proposed system under atmospheric
turbulences. It is noticed from the Fig. 5a that the value of BER for channel 1 under the
influence of light fog is measured as 1.054673e-195, 6.29121e-115 and 2.14587e-003;
under the influence of medium fog it is noted as 3.0407e-95, 2.5019e-025 and 1 whereas
under the influence of heavy fog, it is noted as 4.62678e-032, 0.0141298 and 1 at FSO
transmission link of 1000, 1250 and 1800 m. Similarly, from the Fig. 5b, the value of BER
for channel 10 under the influence of light fog is noted as 2.34879e-192, 5.34572e-112
and 1.39873e-004; under the influence of medium fog, it is noted as 2.34261e-93,
5.62798e-022 and 0.00208306 whereas under the influence of heavy fog, the value of

Fig. 2 Measured BER under clear weather conditions

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A cost effective 100 Gbps hybrid MDM–OCDMA–FSO transmission… Page 7 of 10 184

Fig. 3 Measured eye diagrams at receiver under clear weather conditions: a Channel 1, b Channel 10

Fig. 4 Power coupling

coefficient V/s LP modes: a LG
01 mode, b LG 02 mode

BER is noted as 6.73353e-036, 0.0002857 and 1 at FSO transmission link of 1000, 1250
and 1800 m.
The measured BER shows that the FSO link prolongs to 1500 m under the influence of
light fog, 1250 m under the influence of medium fog whereas under the influence of heavy
fog, the FSO link prolongs to 1000 m with acceptable SNR.

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Fig. 5 Measured BER under the influence of atmospheric turbulences: a Channel 1 b Channel 10

4 Conclusion

In this work, 10 channels, each of carrying 10 Gbps data, are transmitted over FSO channel
having a span of 8 km by using MDM and OCDMA technique. LG 01 and LG 02 modes
are used for mode division multiplexing whereas RD encoder and decoders are used for
OCDMA technique. The combined use of MDM and OCDMA technique allows multiple
high speed channels over single FSO link resulting in saving of huge bandwidth. It is
concluded from results obtained from the simulation setup that under clear weather con-
ditions, FSO link prolongs to 8 km with acceptable BER. When the clear weather con-
dition are changes to light fog, the FSO link prolongs to only 1500 m with acceptable BER.
When the light fog further changes to medium fog, the FSO links prolongs to 1250 m with
acceptable BER. On further increases the fog to heavy one, FSO prolongs to only 1000 m
with acceptable SNR.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Punjab Technical University, Kapurthala, for pro-
viding a valuable platform to carry out this work.

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