Adaptive optical transmitter and receiver for space communication through clouds

Optical space communication will use clouds as part of communication channels. Propagation of optical pulses through clouds causes widening and deformation in the time domain and attenuation of the pulse radiant power. These effects decrease the received signal and limit the information bandwidth of the communication system. This work defines typical characteristics of optical pulse propagation through clouds. Characteristics of the optical pulses are calculated using Monte-Carlo simulation. Based on these characteristics a model for optimum performance of digital optical communication through clouds is presented. Examples for practical communication systems are given. An adaptive method to improve and in some cases to make possible communication is suggested. Comparison and analysis of two models of communication systems in cloud channels are presented: (1) adaptive transmitter and standard receiver (semi-adaptive system) and (2) adaptive transmitter and receiver (adaptive system). An improvement of more than eight orders of magnitude in bit error rate under certain conditions is possible with the new adaptive system model.