Modeling of Scintillation and Phase Fluctuations in MIMO Laser Downlink Scenarios

Scintillation and phase fluctuations are two major challenges in free-space optical communications (FSOC). The variations in channel characteristics caused by scintillation and phase fluctuations set technical limits for the design of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) FSOC communication system. In this paper, we propose a Scintillation and Phase fluctuations Time series Generator (SPTG) that models the correlated scintillation and phase fluctuations on multiple adjacent propagation paths. Different correlation coefficients between the MIMO paths can be modeled in order to reflect various scenarios and associated channels. The SPTG will help further investigate the influence of channel temporal and spatial correlation and support MIMO FSOC transceiver designs.