<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)