A multichannel free-space optical (FSO) communication system based on orbital angular momentum (OAM)-carrying beams is studied. We numerically analyze the effects of atmospheric turbulence on the system and find that turbulence induces attenuation and crosstalk among channels. Based on a model in which the constituent channels are binary symmetric and crosstalk is a Gaussian noise source, we find optimal sets of OAM states at each turbulence condition studied and determine the aggregate capacity of the multichannel system at those conditions. OAM-multiplexed FSO systems that operate in the weak turbulence regime are found to offer good performance. We verify that the aggregate capacity decreases as the turbulence increases. A per-channel bit-error rate evaluation is presented to show the uneven effects of crosstalk on the constituent channels.

By means of numerical simulations we analyze the statistical properties of the power fluctuations induced by the incoherent superposition of multiple transmitted laser beams in a terrestrial free-space optical communication link. The measured signals arising from different transmitted optical beams are found to be statistically correlated. This channel correlation increases with receiver aperture and propagation distance. We find a simple scaling rule for the spatial correlation coefficient in terms of the propagation distance and we are able to predict the scintillation reduction in previously reported experiments with good accuracy. We propose an approximation to the probability density function of the received power of a spatially correlated multiple-beam system in terms of the parameters of the single-channel gamma-gamma function. A bit-error-rate evaluation is also presented to demonstrate the improvement of a multibeam system over its single-beam counterpart.

The propagation of an ON-OFF keying modulated optical signal through an optical atmospheric turbulent channel is considered. The intensity fluctuations of the signal observed at the receiver are modeled using a gamma-gamma distribution. The capacity of this channel is determined for a wide range of turbulence conditions. For a zero inner scale, the capacity decreases monotonically as the turbulence strengthens. For non-zero inner scale, the capacity is not monotonic with turbulence strength. Two error-correction schemes, based on low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, are investigated as a means to improve the bit-error rate (BER) performance of the system. Very large coding gains-ranging from 5.5 to 14 dB, depending on the turbulence conditions-are obtained by these LDPC codes compared with Reed-Solomon error-correction codes of similar rates and lengths.

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Using a mobile experimental testbed, we perform a series of measurements on the detection of laser beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) to evaluate turbulent channel distortions and crosstalk among receive states in an 84-m roofed optical link. We find that a receiver assembly using single-mode fiber coupling serves as a good signal selector in terms of crosstalk rejection. From the recorded temporal channel waveforms, we estimate average crosstalk profiles and propose an appropriate probability density function for the fluctuations of the detected OAM signal. Further measurements of OAM crosstalk are described for a horizontal 400-m link established over our campus.