Performance limits of high-rate space-to-ground optical communications through the turbulent atmospheric channel

Atmospheric turbulence corrupts both the amplitude and phase of an optical field propagating from space to an earth-based receiver. While aperture averaging can mitigate amplitude scintillation effects, the performance of single spatial-mode receiver systems such as coherent detection or preamplified direction detection can be significantly degraded by the corrupted phase when the ratio of aperture diameter D to atmospheric coherence length r 0 exceeds unity. Although adaptive optics may be employed to correct the wavefront, in practice the correction is imperfect and the residual phase errors induce a communications performance loss. That loss is quantified here by Monte Carlo simulation techniques. Single-mode-receiver fade statistics for imperfect phase correction are calculated in terms of the atmospheric Greenwood frequency f g , the adaptive optic servo loop cutoff frequency f c , and the ratio D/r 0 . From these statistics, link bit-error rate (BER) performance is calculated. The results reveal that conventional performance measures such as Strehl ratio or mean signal-to- noise ratio loss can significantly underestimate receiver BER losses. Only when the ratio f g /f c is 0.1 or less will communications losses be small (about 0.5 dB) over a wide range of D/r 0 .