Performance comparison of different optical amplifiers in mitigating the attenuation effects in FSOC

In the present scenario of growing demand for high data rate, the need for free-space optical communication (FSOC) system around us has become an essential feature of communication systems. FSOC offers seamless communication with much higher data rate possessing advantages of both the optical fiber communication and wireless communication. The study of different mitigation techniques presently in use is important. One such method involves mitigation of attenuations by the use optical amplifiers of different types. Effects of different optical amplifiers have been studied in this present paper. The moderate turbulence scenario is considered with atmospheric and geometric losses at data rate of 10 GBPS for a 4-channel wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-based FSOC system. The measuring parameters chosen are Q-factor, bit error rate (BER) and eye diagram. It has been observed that the erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) and the EDFA-EDFA hybrid amplifier give consistent good quality communication for long-distance transmission with large and clear eye opening and acceptable BER of 9.32E-10 and 8.21E-09 at maximum distance of 4 km, while the Raman amplifier and semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) do not approach the maximum reach and fail to achieve acceptable performance beyond 2 km and 1 km, respectively.