CSI estimation with pilot tone for scintillation effects mitigation on satellite optical communication

Abstract

Abstract This study investigates a scintillation mitigation technique in the absence of perfect channel state information (CSI) for satellite optical communications (SOCs). Based on the spectrum property of the on–off keying (OOK) modulation scheme, a pilot tone was inserted into the transmitted signals to estimate turbulence information. Theoretical analysis subsequently demonstrated that the proposed scheme could extract CSI that was close to perfect CSI. The experiments showed that bit-error rate (BER) performance was similar to the results with perfect CSI for each scintillation index 0.1, 0.4 circumstance. It proves that the proposed technique was feasible to be adapted for practical SOC systems.