Resilience of Deep Space FSO Communication Scenario Involving SNSPD Receiver to Atmospheric Turbulence

Future ground to deep space communication systems should support Gbps data links, which are resilient to atmospheric impairments. An alternative and in the same time complementary to the conventional RF technology is the emerging deep space Free Space Optical (FSO) system, which can successfully face the challenge. Aligned with this future possibility, the current paper reports on a performance of the deep space FSO system based on detailed simulations considering single-photon communication scenario. Among the several available optical receiver units, a state of the art Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detector (SNSPD) technology is implemented. The SNSPD is characterized with a quantum efficiency, dead time, dark count rate and number of channels. The investigation is based on the Poisson channel and well-known Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) deployed as a modulation technique. Moreover, the selected receiver aperture diameter provides the necessary resilience to atmospheric turbulence effect. Addressing the sophisticated parameterization of the current simulations, BER performance of the deep space FSO link based on the SNSPD receiver is provided. On the top of it, an output of the SNSPD in RF domain is considered. The sequence of RF output pulses is presented before and after the applied ideal low-pass filter.