Polar-Coded Transmission over 7.8-km Terrestrial Free-Space Optical Links

Free-space optical (FSO) communications can offer high-capacity transmission owing to the properties of the laser beams. However, performance degradation caused by atmospheric turbulence is an urgent issue. Recently, the application of polar codes, which can provide capacity-achieving error-correcti...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shingo Fujita, Eiji Okamoto, Hideki Takenaka, Hiroyuki Endo, Mikio Fujiwara, Mitsuo Kitamura, Ryosuke Shimizu, Masahide Sasaki, Morio Toyoshima
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-04-01
Series:Photonics
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6732/10/4/462
Description
Summary:Free-space optical (FSO) communications can offer high-capacity transmission owing to the properties of the laser beams. However, performance degradation caused by atmospheric turbulence is an urgent issue. Recently, the application of polar codes, which can provide capacity-achieving error-correcting performance with low computational cost for decoding, to FSO communications has been studied. However, long-distance and real-field experiments have not been conducted in these studies. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to present the experimental results of polar-coded transmission over 7.8-km FSO links. Using experimental data, we investigated the performance of polar codes over atmospheric channels, including their superiority to regular low-density parity-check codes. We expect that our results will offer a path toward the application of polar codes in high-speed optical communication networks including satellites.
ISSN:2304-6732