Receiver design for MIMO FSO communication systems with photon-counting detection
Optical wireless communication (OWC) constitutes a key technology for 5G wireless networks. OWC alleviates the radio frequency (RF) spectrum crunch problem by enabling communications in the visible, infrared and ultraviolet optical frequency bands for a variety of indoor and outdoor applications. Outdoor infrared OWC systems are widely referred to as free-space optical (FSO) communications that rely on line-of-sight transmissions of narrow laser beams. The FSO technology is license-free, easy-to-deploy, cost-effective and capable of delivering very high data rates. The major impairment that severely degrades the performance of FSO links is related to the random aspect of the atmosphere. Overcoming atmospheric turbulence-induced fading became the key research area where many solutions have been proposed and analyzed. These solutions include the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques.