BER performance of MSK in ground-to-satellite uplink optical communication under the influence of atmospheric turbulence and detector noise.

Minimum shift keying (MSK) has been widely used in fiber optical communication and free-space optical communication. In order to introduce MSK into satellite laser communication, the bit-error rate (BER) performance of the MSK scheme is investigated in uplink communications under the influence of atmospheric turbulence consisting of weak fluctuation and beam wander. Numerical results indicate that the BER performance of MSK is much better than the performance of on-off keying (OOK). With the laser power being 4 W, the improvement is 5 dB in coherent demodulation and 15 dB in delay coherent demodulation. Furthermore, compared with OOK, optimal values of the divergence angle, receiver diameter, and transmitter beam radius are easier and more practical to achieve in the MSK scheme. The work can benefit ground-to-satellite laser uplink communication system design.