Experimental Study on Beam Wander Under Varying Atmospheric Turbulence Conditions

The performance of free space optical (FSO) communication is affected by various phenomena such as absorption, scattering, and turbulence. For FSO uplink, the major factors that degrade the performance are “turbulence-induced scintillation and beam wander effect.” The effect of scintillation causes fluctuations in the received irradiance and the beam wander effect leads to the displacement of the beam centroid significantly. In this letter, variance in the optical irradiance due to turbulence-induced beam wander effect has been determined experimentally for different operating wavelengths and turbulent conditions in an optical turbulence generator (OTG) chamber.