Performance Evaluation of Turbo Product Codes over the PPM-based Satellite Optical Channel

Atmospheric turbulence produces fluctuations in the irradiance of the transmitted optical beam, which is known as at-mospheric scintillation, severely degrading the link performance. Turbo product codes (TPC) has attracted much attention for its high coding rate and strong abilities of defeating long burst errors, which is a good choice for the highly correlated optical channel. In this paper, a scheme combining turbo product codes (TPC) and pulse-position modulation (PPM) has been analyzed for the temporally correlated satellite-to-ground optical channel with an avalanche photodiode (APD) receiver and Gaussian thermal noise. The results indicate that TPC is capable of defeating long burst errors and it can offer enough temporally diversity for the free-space optical communication (FSOC) system.