Publications

Free-space optical communication links can experience signal power fluctuations due to channel effects such as turbulence and pointing jitter. Systems can ensure reliable, error-free communication over fading channels by using physical-layer techniques (e.g., forward error correction with codeword interleaving) and link-layer techniques (e.g., erasure coding or ARQ). In this work, Shannon capacity analysis is used to compare the fundamental performance of different coding architectures in a variety of link conditions. For systems using coherent receivers we find that, in channels with benign to moderate fade statistics, there can be a ~3 dB link budget advantage to using physical-layer interleaving instead of deferring fade mitigation to the link layer. On the other hand, in very strong fluctuations or when system robustness is paramount, it can be advantageous to use link layer codes.