Performance analysis of OOK receiver with a GSM laser in space to ground optical communication link

In practice, due to reasons related to the characteristics of the laser device and the inevitable error of the processing technique, a laser source emitted from a communication terminal is represented by the Gaussian Schell model (GSM). In a space to ground optical communication link, the incident optical intensity at the receiver aperture is affected by the source coherence parameter and the zenith angle. With full consideration of both the average optical intensity and scintillation, the statistical distribution of the optical intensity and the average bit error rate (BER) are obtained with different zenith angle and source coherence parameter. The effect of the source coherence parameter on the performance of an on-off-keying (OOK) receiver is systematically analyzed. The results indicate that the performance degrades seriously with increasing source coherence parameter or zenith angle. The hope of this work is to improve the redundancy design of the optical communication receiver system.