Error performance analysis for chaotic pulse width position modulation in free space optical communication system

Abstract In this paper, a pulse time modulation method called chaotic pulse width position modulation (CPWPM) is studied for free space optical communication system. This is a digital modulation technique that combines pulse position modulation and pulse width modulation with chaos. In this scheme, the binary information is carried by both the position and width of the pulses, which are modulated by a chaotic signal. Hence, on a single pulse, two bits of information are encoded, which results in higher bit rates, better privacy, and larger effective bandwidth as compared to chaotic pulse position modulation (CPPM) and chaotic pulse width modulation (CPWM) techniques. Probability of error is investigated for different FSO scenarios, i.e., varying turbulence conditions and link lengths for CPWPM scheme. Finally, the performance of CPWPM-FSO system is compared with a commonly used differential chaos shift keying (DCSK) scheme. CPWPM-FSO system shows comparable results as DCSK-FSO system (for probability of error, P e = 10 −4 average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required for DCSK and CPWPM scheme is 40 dB and 41 dB, respectively, for same length and system conditions), while data rate is doubled in latter, and this verifies the validity of using CPWPM in FSO communication system.