Performance evaluation of adaptive optics for atmospheric coherent laser communications

With extremely high sensitivity, the coherent laser communications has a large potential to be used in the long-range and high data-rate free space communication links. However, for the atmospheric turbulent links, the most significant factor that limits the performance of the coherent laser communications is the effect of atmospheric turbulence. In this paper, we try to integrate the adaptive optics (AO) to the coherent laser communications and analyze the performances. It is shown that, when the atmospheric turbulence condition D/r(0) is not larger than 1, can the coherent laser communication system works well without the correction of an AO system. When it is in the gentle turbulent condition (around D/r(0) = 2), only the tip and tilt correction can improve the mixing efficiency and the bit-error rate (BER) significantly. In the moderate (around D/r(0) = 10) or relatively strong (around D/r(0) = 17) turbulent condition, the AO system has to correct about 9 or 35 turbulent modes or more respectively to achieve a favorable performance. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that the AO technique has great potential to improve the performances of the atmospheric coherent laser communications. (C)2014 Optical Society of America