Adaptive turbulence compensation and fast auto-alignment link for free-space optical communications

Abstract

Free-space point-to-point optical communication often suffers from atmospheric turbulence and device vibration where the environment is harsh. In this paper, by introducing an adaptive system composed of turbulence compensation and fast auto-alignment installation, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an optical communication system that is effective against turbulence and vibration. Turbulence compensation can increase the coupling efficiency by at least 3dB, while fast auto-alignment can reduce the spatial range of beam vibration caused by device vibration by 72.22%. Since the photodiode detector (PD) is sensitive to optical power, reducing the loss of the link improves the communication quality of the system. Bit-error rate (BER) of 10-Gbaud 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) signal transmission in the link is also measured under different transmitted power, having ∼8dB power penalty improvement with the adaptive system. In addition, turbulence compensation for higher-order modes such as optical vortex (OV) beams is also implemented, showing a promising prospect in space-division multiplexing (SDM) applications.