Citation

Abstract

The free-space channel is an ideal medium for communicating by means of spatially and temporally coherent optical fields. Here we derive the structure of a coherent optical receiver for M-ary signals assuming Poisson detection statistics. Receiver performance is evaluated for an M-ary signal set consisting of orthogonal Walsh-functions under the assumption of high-intensity symbol counts. The asymptotic performance bound is examined in the limit as both the dimension of the signal-set and the receiver bandwidth become arbitrarily large and it is shown that on the average a maximum of nearly three bits of information can be encoded onto each received photon using the above modulation scheme.

Details

Volume
42-66
Published
December 15, 1981
Pages
60–66
File Size
531.6 KB