Mitigation of atmospheric losses using dual‐polarized 16‐QAM MIMO technique in free‐space optical system in various weather conditions.

Summary: The technique to overcome the challenge while implementing the fiber optical link is investigated using an alternative optical link called a free‐space optical (FSO) link with advanced modulation and signal processing techniques. A dual‐polarized 16‐quadrature amplitude‐modulated signal is transmitted over single and multi‐FSO channels under various atmospheric attenuation conditions. High bandwidth and data rates (up to 10 Gbps), unlicensed spectrum (above 300 GHz), and simplicity of deployment are significant benefits of the FSO system. However, the weather conditions of haze, rain, and fog cause signal attenuation when the optical carrier wave is transmitted over free space, and atmospheric turbulence is a challenge to FSO implementation, which degrades the transmission performance of optical signals for long‐distance communication. For 120 Gbps data transmission, the performance of a multi‐input and multi‐output (MIMO) FSO system is evaluated by observing the bit error rate (BER) and received signal constellation diagram. Optical signal‐to‐noise ratio (OSNR) parameters were iterated to determine the optimal value for back‐to‐back, single‐input, single‐output (SISO), and MIMO systems. Moreover, we examined the proposed system's output with recent articles, including MIMO, multiplexing, and various modulation techniques. The comparison of results shows that the suggested MIMO‐FSO model has enhanced the performance with the lower BER as less than 3.8 × 10−3 (log of BER is −2.42) forward error correction (FEC) limit for 18.7 km link range in clear air with 0.54 dB/km attenuation, 4.8, 4.5, 1.35, and 0.57 km under haze, light fog, medium, and heavy fog with 4.6, 6.9, 28.9, and 75 dB/km attenuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]