An Atmospheric Turbulence Compensation Algorithm Based on FSM-DM Cascaded AO Architecture for FSO Communications

Abstract

Free-space optics (FSO) communication enjoys desirable modulation rates at unexploited frequency bands, however, its application is hindered by atmospheric turbulence which causes phase shifting in laser links. Although a single deformable mirror (DM) adaptive optics (AO) system is a good solution, its performance remains unsatisfactory as the proportion of tilts aberrations becomes relatively high. This condition happens when the incident angle of the laser beam for the optical receiver dynamically shifts. To tackle this problem, we introduce a fast steering mirror (FSM), DM cascaded AO architecture, based upon which we also propose an atmospheric turbulence compensation algorithm. In this paper, we compare the compensation ability of FSM and DM towards tilts aberrations. Furthermore, we gain model matrices for FSM and DM from testbed and simulatively verify the effectiveness of our work. For a Kolmogorov theory-based atmospheric turbulence disturbed incident laser beam where the tilt components take up 80% of the total proportion of wavefront aberrations, our proposed architecture compensates the input wavefront to a residual wavefront root mean square (RMS) of 116 wavelength, compared to 16 wavelength for single DM architecture. The study intends to overcome atmospheric turbulence and has the potential to guide the development of future FSO communications.