Experimental Evaluation of Polar Code Transmission in Terrestrial Free-Space Optics

In recent years, the demand for high-speed communication has been increasing. Satellite laser communication is one of the infrastructures that can realize this demand. However, in free-space optics (FSO) that use satellite laser communications, a scintillation occurs when the light passes through the atmosphere, resulting in a burst error. To prevent this, a strong error correction code is required. The polar code, one of such channel coding schemes, has been recently proposed. We have considered applying polar codes into FSO channels and have evaluated its performances through computer simulations. However, the experiments of polar code transmission in an outdoor FSO channel has not been studied. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct an experiment in polar code transmission in a terrestrial FSO channel instead of a satellite FSO as the first step of study, and then analyze the performance from the transmission results.