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The main drawback in communicating via the freespace optical channel is the detrimental effect the atmosphere has on a propagating laser beam. Atmospheric turbulence causes random fluctuations in the irradiance of the received laser beam, commonly referred to as scintillation. We investigate the mitigation of scintillation through the use of multiple lasers and multiple apertures, thereby creating a multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) channel. We adopt a quasi-static block fading model and study the outage probability of the channel under the assumption of orthogonal pulse-position modulation. Non-ideal photodetection is also assumed such that the combined shot noise and thermal noise are considered as signal-independent additive Gaussian white noise. Assuming perfect receiver channel state information (CSI), we compute the signal-to-noise ratio exponents for the cases when the scintillation is lognormal, exponential and gamma-gamma distributed, which cover a wide range of atmospheric turbulence conditions. Furthermore, we illustrate very large gains when CSI is also available at the transmitter.

Abstract-We study the hybrid free-space optical (FSO) and radio-frequency (RF) channel from an information theoretic perspective. Since both links operate at vastly different carrier frequencies, we model the hybrid channel as a pair of parallel channels. Moreover, since the FSO channel signals at a higher rate than the RF channel, we incorporate this key feature in the parallel channel model. Both channels experience fading due to scintillation, which is slow compared to typical signalling rates. Under this framework, we study the fundamental limits of the hybrid channel. In particular, we analyse the outage probability in the large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, and obtain the outage diversity or SNR exponent of the hybrid system. First we consider the case when only the receiver has perfect channel state information (CSIR case), and obtain the exponents for general scintillation distributions. These exponents relate key system design parameters to the asymptotic outage performance and illustrate the benets of using hybrid systems with respect to independent FSO or RF links. We next consider the case when perfect CSI is known at both the receiver and transmitter, and derive the optimal power allocation strategy that minimises the outage probability subject to peak and average power constraints. The optimal solution involves non-convex optimisation, which is intractable in practical systems. We therefore propose a suboptimal algorithm that achieves signicant power savings (on the order of tens of dBs) over uniform power allocation. We show that the suboptimal algorithm has the same diversity as the optimal power allocation strategy.

We study the asymptotic outage performance of incremental redundancy automatic repeat request (INR-ARQ) transmission over the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) block-fading channels with discrete input constellations. We first show that transmission with random codes using a discrete signal constellation across all transmit antennas achieves the optimal outage diversity given by the Singleton bound. We then analyze the optimal SNR-exponent and outage diversity of INR-ARQ transmission over the MIMO block-fading channel. We show that a significant gain in outage diversity is obtained by providing more than one bit feedback at each ARQ round.Thus, the outage performance of INR-ARQ transmission can be remarkably improved with minimal additional overhead. A suboptimal feedback and power adaptation rule, which achieves the optimal outage diversity, is proposed for MIMO INR-ARQ, demonstrating the benefits provided by multi-bit feedback.

The free-space optical channel has the potential to facilitate inexpensive, wireless communication with fiber-like bandwidth under short deployment timelines. However, atmospheric effects can significantly degrade the reliability of a free-space optical link. In particular, atmospheric turbulence causes random fluctuations in the irradiance of the received laser beam, commonly referred to as scintillation.The scintillation process is slow compared to the large data rates typical of optical transmission. As such, we adopt a quasi-static block fading model and study the outage probability of the channel under the assumption of orthogonal pulse-position modulation. We investigate the mitigation of scintillation through the use of multiple lasers and multiple apertures, thereby creating a multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) channel. Non-ideal photodetection is also assumed such that the combined shot noise and thermal noise are considered as signal-independent additive Gaussian white noise. Assuming perfect receiver channel state information (CSI), we compute the signal-to-noise ratio exponents for the cases when the scintillation is lognormal, exponential and gamma-gamma distributed, which cover a wide range of atmospheric turbulence conditions. Furthermore, we illustrate very large gains, in some cases larger than 15 dB, when transmitter CSI is also available by adapting the transmitted electrical power.

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