Implementation of a 10 Gbps Coherent Receiver for Free-Space Optical Communications

We show the implementation of an optical coherent receiver suitable for inter-satellite communications supporting both Dual-Polarization Binary Phase Shift Keying (DP-BPSK) and Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (DP-QPSK) modulation formats, enabling data transmission at rates of up to 10 Gbps. The performance of the implemented receiver's digital signal processing algorithms is numerically and experimentally evaluated under different operation conditions and channel impairments, such as received power, carrier frequency offset, laser linewidth, and polarization rotation.