Simulation research of medium-short distance free-space optical communication with optical amplification based on polarization shift keying modulation

Circular polarization shift keying (CPolSK) modulation technique has many advantages such as excellent BER performance and freedom from the alignment of polarization coordinates of the transmitter and the receiver, etc., and it turns out to be a good choice to FSO system. In this paper, a FSO system using CPolSK modulation is studied by simulation; it is found that the communication performance of the system is excellent in most weather condition. Additionally, three ways of optical signal amplification are proposed, and contrastive analysis on performance of corresponding optical amplification systems is carried out by examining SNR, BER and transmission distance with different specific attenuation. The results show that the system with optical amplifier at the transmitter have the optimum performance, and then the system with optical amplifier at the both ends with the same total gain, it is worst for the system with optical amplifier at the receiver. In addition, the safety factor for high emission power induced by optical amplification is also considered in this paper for practical application. The study above may be utilized in the system design for enhancing performance. (C) 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.