Performance Comparison of All-Optical Amplify-and-Forward Relaying FSO Communication Systems with OOK and DPSK Modulations

Abstract

All-optical amplify-and-forward (OAF) relaying technique can amplify and filter the attenuated optical signal in optical domain, and thus is regarded as a simple way to extend the transmission distance of free-space optical (FSO) communication systems. At the relaying node, however, the incident background radiation and the amplified spontaneous emission noise of the deployed erbium-doped fiber amplifier will deteriorate the optical signal-to-noise, therefore causing the degradation of the system's bit error ratio (BER). In this paper, we perform simulations and experiments on FSO system with on-off keying (OOK) and differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) signals, focusing on the receiving sensitivity loss (RSL) of the OAF-assisted dual-hop system. Taking the BER level of 10-7 as the reference, we find that the DPSK system suffers more than 8 dB RSL at the data rate of 5 Gb/s in simulation, while the OOK system gets less than 1 dB RSL at the same data rate. In the following experiments, the obtained results exhibit that RSL of DPSK system is nearly 10 dB, which of OOK system is less than 1.5 dB, shown similarly property to the simulations.