Performance analysis optimization and experimental verification of a photon-counting communication system based on non-photon-number-resolution detectors

Abstract

With the increase in free-space optical communication distance and link attenuation, photon-counting communication based on a single photon detector will be the development trend in the future. In this paper, we use a single-pixel single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detector to study the bit error rate (BER) performance of photon counting communication. As the single-pixel SPAD cannot distinguish the number of photons in a single detection event, we theoretically derive the (BER) model of a pulse position modulation (PPM) communication system based on a single-pixel SPAD detector. Then, the binary asymmetric channel (BAC) model is adopted to modify the channel log-likelihood in Serially Concatenated Pulse Position Modulation (SCPPM) decoding. Research results show that, when the BER is 10−6 , the photon efficiency can reach 1.6 photon per bit (PPB) in the modified BAC scheme with 0.1 photon/slot noise intensity, which is 28.6% better than the photon efficiency of 2.24 PPB in the unmodified Poisson channel scheme.