Experimental study of the beam wander mitigation in free space optical communications using single input multiple output system

Abstract

This paper experimentally investigates the use of a single input multiple output (SIMO) free space optical (FSO) communication system in an indoor laboratory controlled turbulence chamber. Two receiver circuits are used with a single laser input. The current outputs of two receivers were combined using equal gain combining (EGC) scheme and compared with single input single output (SISO) FSO system. A weak turbulence was generated within the atmospheric chamber and link performances are measured using ß-factor and bit error rate (BER) for On-Off Keying (OOK) modulation scheme. The results demonstrated that the simplest form of SIMO can improve the performance of the FSO communication channel under weak turbulent condition.