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Free-space optical communication (FSO) has been proposed as an attractive alternative to radio frequency communication in the sense that it provides wide bandwidth and high capacity without requirement of license. However, the scalability of FSO link is limited by pointing error, atmospheric turbulence, and loss. Especially, when it comes to the FSO link between moving platforms, it is imperative works to analyze the statistical channel model considering accurate pointing errors and atmospheric turbulence at the same time. In this paper, we analyze performance of FSO links over various atmospheric situations with pointing errors. First, we assume strong turbulence and obtain a unified approximation of the composite probability density function (PDF) of channel gain, which embraces generalized pointing error models. This approximation leads to new unified formulas for the bit error rate (BER) and outage capacity of a FSO link, which account for the two possible detection mechanisms of intensity modulation/direct detection (IM/DD) and heterodyne detection. Secondly, we statistically derive the unified composite PDF containing all possible pointing error models based on weak turbulence model. In addition, we analyze BER performance in FSO communication with IM/DD and heterodyne detection technology based on the derived unified composite PDF results. Finally, we investigate the ergodic capacity of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based FSO links over random foggy channel. More specifically, we derive composite PDF and close approximation for the moments of the composite PDF using the statistical model of a UAV-based 3D pointing error and a random foggy channel. With it, we obtain upper bound and asymptotic approximation of the ergodic capacity for the two possible detection techniques of IM/DD and heterodyne detection at high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes.

<p>Free-space optical (FSO) communication has witnessed rapid development recently in response to ever-increasing demands for greater bandwidth. FSO links provide fiberspeed with the flexibility of wireless. Commercially available systems offer transmission speeds up to 2.5 Gbps, 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps, and demonstration systems report data rates as high as 160 Gbps. Its advantages also include license free operation, high immunity to interference, and ease of deployment. However, FSO systems are sensitive to adverse weather conditions such as fog, rain and snow.</p> <p>In order to improve the availability of FSO channels degraded by atmospheric turbulence and varying weather conditions, the effects of channel gain variations must be compensated. In this thesis, two rate-adaptive techniques, punctured low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and Raptor codes, are studied using experimental data measured over a1.87 km terrestrial FSO link.</p> <p>Rate-adaptive performances with punctured LDPC codes and Raptor codes are evaluated in terms of outage probability and throughput. In comparison to uncoded system, rate-adaptive systems with both techniques demonstrate significant improvement of throughput and mitigation of outage probability especially in rainy weather. Due to its flexible rate-adaptation and simple hardware implementation, Raptor coded systems are judged more applicable to be implemented in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based hardware. A dedicated decoding structure is proposed and tested, showing remarkable improvement in resource efficiency as compared to traditional Gauss-Jordan (GJ) decoding structures.</p> / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Approximately, two-thirds of earth's surface is covered by water. There is a growing interest from the military and commercial communities in having, an efficient, secure and high bandwidth underwater wireless communication (UWC) system for tactical underwater applications such as oceanography studies and offshore oil exploration. The existing acoustic and radio frequency (RF) technologies are severely limited in bandwidth because of the strong frequency dependent attenuation of sound in seawater and the high conductivity of seawater at radio frequencies, respectively. Recently, underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) has been proposed as the best alternative or complementary solution to meet this challenge. Taking advantage of the low absorption window of seawater in blue-green (400-550 nm) regime of the electromagnetic spectrum, UWOC is expected to establish secure, efficient and high data rate communication links over short and moderate distances (< 100 m) for versatile applications such as underwater oil pipe inspection, remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and sensor networks. UWOC uses the latest gallium nitrite (GaN) visible light-emitting diode (LED) and laser diode (LD) transmitters. Although some research on LED lased UWOC is being conducted, both the military and academic 5 research communities are favoring the use of laser beams, which potentially could enhance the available bandwidth by up to three orders of magnitude. However, the underwater wireless channel is optically very challenging and difficult to predict. The propagation of laser beams in seawater is significantly affected by the harsh marine environments and suffers from severe attenuation which is a combined effect of absorption and scattering, optical turbulence, and multipath effects at high transmission rates. These limitations distort the intensity and phase structure of the optical beam leading to a decrease in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) which ultimately degrades the performance of UWOC links by increasing the probability of error. In this dissertation, we seek to experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of short range (≤ 20 m) UWOC systems over various underwater channel water types using different modulation schemes as well as to model and describe the statistical properties of turbulence-induced fading in underwater wireless optical channels using laser beam intensity fluctuations measurements.

Electroabsorption is the physical phenomenon by which the absorption of light in a medium can be controlled by applying an electric field. The Quantum–Confined Stark Effect, which makes the absorption band–edge in quantum wells very field–dependent, together with the strong absorption peak provided by excitons, are the physical foundations for the success of electroabsorption modulators based on quantum well structures in telecommunication networks. This thesis describes the design and fabrication of surface–normal electroabsorption modulation devices. The techniques needed to understand the design and fabrication of surface–normal multiple quantum well optical modulators are introduced, as are the various characterisation techniques used during and after the fabrication. Devices for several types of applications have been designed, fabricated, characterised and in some cases integrated into optical systems: – Two–dimensional arrays of 128´128 pixel amplitude modulators grown on GaAs substrates have been fabricated and characterised. Speeds of up to 11700 frames per second were demonstrated, limited by the output electronics of the computer interface. – Large–area modulators grown on GaAs substrates for free–space optical communication were developed, with an active area of 2cm2 and a modulation speed of several megahertz. Contrast ratios up to 5:1 on full modulator areas were measured. Problems limiting the yield and modulation speed of such devices have been studied, and solutions to overcome them have been demonstrated. – Large–area devices grown on InP substrates for free–space optical communication have been developed. Contrast ratios of up to 2:1 for transmissive types have been demonstrated. – Devices consisting of two rows of pixels, grown on GaAs substrates, with an active area of 22mm´5mm, divided into 64 or 128 pixels per row have been developed. These amplitude modulation devices were designed for optical signal processing applications. – One variant of these optical signal processing devices was also characterised as a ternary, binary amplitude and binary phase modulator array. – The use of GaAs multiple quantum well optical modulators in a free–space optical retro–communication system has been studied. An opto–mechanical design for a modulating retro–reflector is described, allowing a large field of view in one direction using reflecting, resonant–cavity modulators for high contrast ratios. / QC 20100802

Wireless communication is facing an increasingly severe spectrum scarcity problem. Hybrid free space optical (FSO)/ millimetre wavelength (MMW) radio frequency (RF) systems and cognitive radios are two candidate solutions. Hybrid FSO/RF can achieve high data rate transmission for wireless back haul. Cognitive radio transceivers can opportunistically access the underutilized spectrum resource of existing systems for new wireless services. In this work we carry out accurate performance analysis on these two transmission techniques. In particular, we present and analyze a switching based transmission scheme for a hybrid FSO/RF system. Specifically, either the FSO or RF link will be active at a certain time instance, with the FSO link enjoying a higher priority. We consider both a single threshold case and a dual threshold case for FSO link operation. Analytical expressions are obtained for the outage probability, average bit error rate and ergodic capacity for the resulting system. We also investigate the delay performance of secondary cognitive transmission with interweave implementation. We first derive the exact statistics of the extended delivery time, that includes both transmission time and waiting time, for a fixed-size secondary packet. Both work-preserving strategy (i.e. interrupted packets will resume transmission from where interrupted) and non-work-preserving strategy (i.e. interrupted packets will be retransmitted) are considered with various sensing schemes. Finally, we consider a M/G/1 queue set-up at the secondary user and derive the closed-form expressions for the expected delay with Poisson traffic. The analytical results will greatly facilitate the design of the secondary system for particular target application. / Graduate

Die Quantenschlüsselverteilung (QKD), die erste anwendbare Quantentechnologie, verspricht informationstheoretisch sichere Kommunikation. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde das Zeit-Frequenz (TF)-QKD-Protokoll untersucht, das Zeit und Frequenz, nämlich Puls-Positionsmodulation (PPM) im Zeitbereich und Frequenzumtastung (FSK) im Frequenzbereich als die beiden komplementären Basen verwendet. Seine Sicherheit beruht den Quanteneigenschaften von Licht und auf der Zeit-Frequenz-Unschärferelation. TF-QKD kann mit größtenteils Standard-Telekommunikationstechnologie im 1550-nm-Band implementiert werden. Die PPM-Basis kann mit Modulatoren und die FSK-Basis mit Hilfe der Wellenlängenmultiplex-Technologie realisiert werden. Das TF-QKD-Protokoll ist in der Lage, ein beliebig großes Alphabet bereitzustellen, was mehr als 1 bit/Photon ermöglicht. Darüber hinaus ist es robust gegenüber athmosphärischen Störungen und somit für die Übertragung über den Freiraumkanal geeignet. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird das TF-QKD-Protokoll theoretisch bewertet, mit Standardkomponenten für 1 bit/Photon implementiert und die Freiraumübertragung mit optischem Tracking über eine 388 m Teststrecke wird bei Tageslicht demonstriert. Unter Verwendung der vorhandenen Komponenten konnte eine sichere Schlüsselrate von 364 kbit/s back-to-back und 9 kbit/s über den Freiraumkanal demonstriert werden. / Quantum key distribution (QKD), the first applicable quantum technology, promises information theoretically secure communication. In the presented work the time-frequency (TF)-QKD protocol was examined, which uses time and frequency, namely pulse position modulation (PPM) in the time domain and frequency shift keying (FSK) in the frequency domain as the two complementary bases. Its security relies on the quantum properties of light and the time-frequency uncertainty relation. TF-QKD can be implemented mostly with standard telecom-technology in the 1550 nm band. The PPM basis can be implemented with modulators and the FSK basis with help of wavelength-division multiplexing technology. The TF-QKD protocol is capable of providing an arbitrarily large alphabet enabling more than 1 bit/photon. Moreover, it is robust in the atmosphere making it suitable for transmission over the free-space channel. In the present work the TF-QKD protocol is assessed theoretically, implemented with off-the-shelf components for 1 bit/photon and free-space transmission with optical tracking over a 388 m testbed is demonstrated in daylight. Using components at hand, secret key rates of 364 kbit/s back-to-back and 9 kbit/s over the free-space channel could be demonstrated.

The dissertation thesis deals with a free space optical links, especially is focused directly to the transmission optical beams. The influence of environmental conditions like atmospheric turbulence, buildings movement and vibration is described. As a possibility to reduce these undesirable influences, the generation of the transmission beam by the help of the two-mode optical fiber is proposed. A possibility to drive the shape of the resulting transmission beam by means of the change of power ration of individual modes in fiber is described. The coherence features of the proposed beam are analyzed considering the possibility to reduce the influence of atmospheric turbulence. In the thesis there are introduced beam quality parameters that enable to evaluate the quality of the optical beam for the free space optical link. These parameters give the relationship between the shape of the optical beam and the power balance of the optical link and the statistical evaluation of the optical link.

This master’s thesis deals with the impact of atmospheric turbulence on phase changes of a free space optical signal. This problematic is investigated by the interferometric method. A part of the thesis is focused on the phenomenon of atmospheric turbulence. Then the physical effect of interference is discussed and optical interferometers are described. The experimental part of the thesis is focused on measurement of phase shift of optical signal by interferometric method. The result of the thesis is to determine how phase shift of an optical beam depends on the strength of turbulence.

[pt] Este trabalho apresenta o estudo de comunicação óptica quântica no infravermelho, utilizando um sistema híbrido fibra-óptica – espaço-livre, como prova de princípio para o estabelecimento de chaves secretas a fim de utilização em criptografia do tipo one-time pad. Ao modular a polarização da luz de um laser em polarizações ortogonais, podem-se codificar os bits clássicos 1 e 0 em cada uma dessas polarizações, sendo detectadas por detectores contadores de fótons únicos, e, assim, utilizar o canal quântico para transmissão dos bits quânticos entre dois interlocutores, utilizandoos para o estabelecimento da chave criptográfica, que pode ser usada em qualquer tipo de informação a ser transmitida por um canal clássico ou quântico. Ao realizar a transmissão em espaço-livre, sujeita a variações climáticas, como temperatura atmosférica, luz solar, presença de nuvens, chuva e vento, foi também estudada a influência destes fenômenos na qualidade da transmissão e dos dados obtidos. Os resultados experimentais demonstraram consistência com a teoria e com outros trabalhos publicados na área até esta data com relação às taxas de erro de bit quântico e também à taxa de transmissão de bits. As taxas de erro obtidas, por estarem abaixo do limiar teórico para segurança da informação em comunicação quântica, provam, ainda, a possibilidade de estabelecimento de chave secreta para criptografia através do uso de distribuição quântica das chaves (QKD). Os resultados também apresentaram boa qualidade da informação recuperada após a descriptografia. / [en] This work presents the study of optical quantum communication in the infrared region, using a hybrid optical-fiber – free-space system, as proof of principle for the agreement on secret keys by two parties for use in one-time pad encryption. By modulating the polarization of laser light into orthogonal polarizations, one can encode the classic bits 1 and 0 in each of these polarizations, being detected by single photon counter detectors, and can use the quantum channel to transmit the quantum bits between two interlocutors. It is then possible to use those bits to establish the cryptographic key, which can be used in any type of information to be transmitted by a classic or quantum channel. While carrying out transmission in free space optics, subject to climatic variations, such as atmospheric temperature, sunlight, presence of clouds and rain, and the presence of wind, the influence of these phenomena on the quality of transmission and on the data obtained was also studied. The experimental results showed consistency with the theory and with other works published to date with regard to quantum bit error rates and to the bit rate. The error rates obtained, being below the theoretical threshold for information security in quantum communication, further proves the possibility of establishing a secret key for encryption through the use of quantum key distribution (QKD). It also presented good quality on the information recovered after decryption.