Simulation of coding for atmospheric optical channel

The paper deals with coding for terrestrial free-space optical links that are characterized by outages in the order of tens of milliseconds. For high transmission rates the optical channel can be simply modeled as a slowly varying AWGN channel. The paper provides a simple framework for FSO channel modeling in the time domain, using samples of power received from a real link or generated by a turbulence model. Simple formulae for transforming the model for different link parameters are provided. The proposed coding scheme is based on a combination of error correction of individual packets and the LDGM code for mitigating short link fades. Data for simulation were obtained from a real 7 km link.