Mitigation of turbulence-induced scintillation noise in free-space optical links using temporal-domain detection techniques

Atmospheric turbulence-induced intensity fluctuations can significantly impair the performance of free-space optical links. Temporal-domain detection techniques can be applied to mitigate these intensity fluctuations. If the receiver has knowledge of the joint temporal statistics of intensity fluctuations, maximum-likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) or pilot-symbol assisted detection (PSAD) can be employed. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques in a 500-m terrestrial link using ON-OFF keying, where MLSD and PSAD yield signal-to-noise ratio gains of 2.4 and 1.9 dB, respectively.