Decision-Feedback Detection for Free-Space Optical Communications

Free-space optics (FSO) have received increased attention recently for last-mile wireless links. In this paper, we investigate noncoherent detection, i.e. detection assuming the absence of channel state information at the receiver, of on-off keying (OOK) in an FSO system. To partially recover the performance loss associated with conventional symbol-by- symbol noncoherent detection, we consider the application of decision-feedback detection (DFD), in which symbol-by-symbol decisions are made using previous decisions and an observation window of N received statistics. Analytical and simulation results indicate that the performance of a DFD receiver approaches the coherent detection lower bound with increasing window length. Consequently, as the proposed receiver exhibits a complexity independent of N, the conclusion is reached that DFD is an effective approach for noncoherent detection in an FSO system.