Crosstalk Cancellation in Structured Light Free Space Optical Communication

Abstract

Free-space optics (FSO) is an unlicensed communication technology that uses the free space as a propagation medium to connect two communicating terminal wire- lessly [1]. It is an attractive solution to the last-mile connectivity problems in commu- nication networks, mainly when installing optical fibers is expensive or unavailable. A possible idea to increase the throughput of wireless optical links in free space is to use spatial multiplexing (SMM) [2]. Optical beam distortion due to propagation through a turbulent channel is one of the main factors limiting performance of such a system. Therefore, overcoming the effect of turbulence is a major problem for structured light optical communication in free space. Usually, this problem is approached by using adaptive optics systems and various methods of digital signal processing (DSP) on the receiver side [3–5]. Recently, an idea of optical channel pre-compensation to mit- igate inter-modal crosstalk was proposed [6] and experimentally validated [7]. Such a method, if implemented, will allow the use of entirely passive receivers or, in the case of full-duplex transmission, increase throughput. Here, the performance of a zero-forcing precoding technique to mitigate the effects of an optical turbulence in a Laguerre Gaussian mode based SMM FSO is investigated. Equally, details on a close to reality simulation of the atmospheric turbulence and beam propagation are provided.