Impact of turbulence on multi-wavelength coherent optical communications

In this paper, we present the impact of optical turbulence on the performance of coherent optical communications which employs multi-wavelength plane wave optical radiation. Performance is assessed in terms of the achievable signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio as a function of the receiver aperture size. It is demonstrated that the use of multi-wavelength radiation improves the effective SNR. Furthermore, it is shown that the onset of SNR saturation fue to an increase in the aperture size is impacted by the use of multi-wavelength radiation.