Beaconless angle-of-arrival tracking with improved receiver sensitivity and tracking precision for free-space optical communications

Abstract

One of the technically challenging issues of free-space optical communication systems is the mitigation of angle-of-arrival (AoA) fluctuations, mainly arising from the vibration of receiving end and atmospheric turbulence. A common approach is to employ an AoA tracking system at the receiver. Beacon-based AoA tracking requires the beacon light, thus the system could be complicated and bulky when implemented. Beaconless AoA tracking could help to minimize the optical components required. This tracking typically requires an optical beam splitter to direct the received optical signal both to the beam position sensor and data photo-detector (PD). However, the presence of beam splitter results in optical power loss and tracking imprecision. In this paper, we propose a design of AoA tracking system based on an integrated beam positioning sensor and data PD to obviate the need for beacon light and beam splitter. We carry out a proof-of-concept experimental demonstration of AoA tracking systems for a 10-Gb/s free-space optical link over 104 m, comparing its performance with that of the conventional system. The demonstration shows a loss reduction of >2.9 dB by using the proposed design. It also shows that the proposed design improves the tolerance to AoA fluctuation by more than a factor of 2 at a target bit-error ratio of 10−3. The tracking time is measured to be 171 ms at an AoA fluctuation of 250 μrad. We show that the loop controller and fast steering mirror bandwidths are the main factors limiting the tracking time.