Airborne Laser Communications with Impulse Response Shortening and Viterbi Decoding

This paper is about signal processing schemes for airborne free-space optical wireless communications through cloud. FSO channel is known to be accompanied by multiscattering, which causes severe intersymbol interference. Unlike traditional FSO with optical signal processing, this research will study feasibility of RF signal processing schemes applied to FSO. By employing a channel shortening equalizer followed by a maximum likelihood sequential detector, reliable communication at low-to-mid level optical thickness values is shown to be feasible