Abstract

The performance of the atmospheric optical communication system employing quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation format over atmospheric turbulence channels was experimentally investigated in this paper. To improve the receiver sensitivity heterodyne detection was implemented in the system. A liquid crystal atmospheric turbulence simulator (LC-ATS) generated atmospheric turbulence which could be described by K-distributed channel model. The experimental results demonstrated that the turbulence could degrade the system performance and cause phase fluctuation of the transmitted signal.

© 2013 Optical Society of America