Citation

Abstract

The structure of an optimal adaptive array receiver for ground-based optical communications is described and its performance investigated. Kolmogorov phase screen simulations are used to model the sample functions of the focal-plane signal distribution due to turbulence and to generate realistic spatial distributions of the received optical field. This novel array detector concept reduces interference from background radiation by efiectively assigning higher confidence levels at each instant of time to those detector elements that contain significant signal energy and suppressing those that do not. A simpler suboptimum structure that replaces the continuous weighting function of the optimal receiver by a hard decision on the selection of the signal detector elements also is described and evaluated. Approximations and bounds to the error probability are derived and compared with the exact calculations and receiver simulation results. It is shown that, for photoncounting receivers observing Poisson-distributed signals, performance improvements of approximately 5 dB can be obtained over conventional single-detector photoncounting receivers, when operating in high background environments.

Keywords

optical array detection maximum likelihood array detection adaptive optical receivers

Details

Volume
42-141
Published
May 15, 2000
Pages
1–22
File Size
1.0 MB