Demonstration of turbulence-tolerant free-space optical communication receiver using few-mode-fiber coupling and digital combining

Abstract

We improved the coupling efficiency to the free-space optical receiver by using a few-mode fiber with the optical signal distorted with a turbulence emulator. We demonstrated digital maximum ratio combining over 10-Gb/s BPSK transmission mitigated fading, relaxing the required transmitted power by 5 dB.