Photon Information Efficient Communication Through Atmospheric Turbulence–Part I: Channel Model and Propagation Statistics

Optical communication with high photon-efficiency (many bits/photon) and high spectral efficiency (SE) (many bits/s-Hz) cannot be achieved unless multiple spatial modes are employed. For vacuum propagation, it is known that achieving 10 bits/photon and 5 bits/s-Hz requires 189 low-loss spatial modes at the ultimate Holevo limit and 4500 such modes at the Shannon limit for on-off keying with direct detection. For terrestrial propagation paths, however, atmospheric turbulence corrupts multiple spatial-mode operation. This paper derives power-transmissivity bounds and average intermodal crosstalks for the turbulent channel that depend solely on the mutual coherence function of the atmospheric Green's function. These statistics are then evaluated for ~ 200 spatial-mode systems whose transmitters use either focused-beam, Hermite-Gaussian (HG), or Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes and whose receivers either do or do not employ adaptive optics. It is shown that: (1) adaptive optics are not necessary for achieving both high photon information efficiency (PIE) and high SE; (2) systems employing HG or LG modes achieve the same capacities through turbulence; and (3) the orbital angular momentum carried by LG modes does not provide turbulence immunity. In the companion paper [N. Chandrasekaran, J. H. Shapiro, and L. Wang, “Photon Information Efficient Communication Through Atmospheric Turbulence-Part II: Bounds on Ergodic Classical and Private Capacities,” J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 1088-1097, Mar. 2014], the transmissivity bounds are used to quantify the turbulence-induced loss in PIE versus SE performance for these mode sets.