On the Performance of Satellite-to-Ground Optical Communication over Atmospheric Turbulence Channels with Pointing Errors

We investigate the effect of atmosphere and device parameters on the performance of satellite-to-ground optical links. The parameters that we take into account are link distance, Rytov variance, wavelength, Fried parameter, zenith angle, aperture diameter, beam waist and jitter variance. We consider two modulation schemes, pulse position modulation (PPM) and binary polarization shift keying (BPOLSK), and evaluate the performance for both uncoded and coded systems considering single and multiple aperture receivers. The results show that especially for large zenith angles the performance loss can be compensated with diversity and coding and thus communication time that the satellite and ground station stay connected can be extended.