Trade-offs in the performance of a Free Space Optical communication system employing DCO-OFDM transmission with a PAPR-dependent DC-bias.

Free Space Optical (FSO) communication technology has gained popularity because of its high bandwidth, which supports high-speed data transmission. Despite its merits over Radio Frequency technology, the FSO system performance is restricted by the combined impact of beam divergence, beam scintillation, and beam-wander effects triggered by atmospheric turbulence. A Gamma–Gamma probability density function (PDF) channel model is employed to model the irradiance fluctuations due to turbulence. In this paper, we evaluate the performance metrics of a FSO link employing the Direct Current-biased Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) modulation technique for different turbulent conditions. In our paper, we determine the DC-bias, which is proportional to peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) and a preclipping factor of n c l i p (< 1) in order to reduce the transmitted optical power of the DCO-OFDM signal. We evaluate the average bit error rate (BER) and outage probability of the FSO link by considering the impact of system design parameters related to the OFDM signal, laser beam, and atmospheric turbulence on the received signal. Numerical simulation results show that, depending on the chosen values of PAPR and preclipping, an FSO link can experience either a power saving or a power penalty, for meeting the BER requirement. It is further demonstrated that trade-offs in performance at various levels exist between data transmission rate (QAM size), system power efficiency (preclipping), signal-PAPR and link-span to ensure target signal quality (BER and Outage). Under turbulence, the link with a longer span not only incurs a power penalty but also suffers from a reduced operating range by 3–4 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]