Rateless Codes Performance Tests On Terrestrial FSO Time-Correlated Channel Model

Abstract

Free Space Optics (FSO) links are affected by several impairments: optical turbulence, scattering, absorption, and pointing. In particular, atmospheric optical turbulence generates optical power fluctuations at the receiver that can degrade communications with fading events, especially, in high data rate links. A way to mitigate FSO link outages can be to add a coding to communications. Nevertheless, in order to study innovative solutions (software or hardware) and to improve the FSO link performance it needs accurate testing models. In this paper we describe an accurate time-correlated channel model able to predict random temporal fluctuations of optical signal irradiance caused by optical turbulence. Moreover, concerning the same channel, we also report simulation results on the error mitigation performance of Luby-Transform, Raptor, and RaptorQ codes.