Performance analysis of an OAM multiplexing-based MIMO FSO system over atmospheric turbulence using space-time coding with channel estimation

The average bit error rate (ABER) performance of an orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing-based free-space optical (FSO) system with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture has been investigated over atmospheric turbulence considering channel estimation and space-time coding. The impact of different types of space-time coding, modulation orders, turbulence strengths, receive antenna numbers on the transmission performance of this OAM-FSO system is also taken into account. On the basis of the proposed system model, the analytical expressions of the received signals carried by the k-th OAM mode of the n-th receive antenna for the vertical bell labs layered space-time (V-Blast) and space-time block codes (STBC) are derived, respectively. With the help of channel estimator carrying out with least square (LS) algorithm, the zero-forcing criterion with ordered successive interference cancellation criterion (ZF-OSIC) equalizer of V-Blast scheme and Alamouti decoder of STBC scheme are adopted to mitigate the performance degradation induced by the atmospheric turbulence. The results show that the ABERs obtained by channel estimation have excellent agreement with those of turbulence phase screen simulations. The ABERs of this OAM multiplexing-based MIMO system deteriorate with the increase of turbulence strengths. And both V-Blast and STBC schemes can significantly improve the system performance by mitigating the distortions of atmospheric turbulence as well as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). In addition, the ABER performances of both space-time coding schemes can be further enhanced by increasing the number of receive antennas for the diversity gain and STBC outperforms V-Blast in this system for data recovery. This work is beneficial to the OAM FSO system design.