Optical Wireless Communications with Adaptive Subcarrier PSK Intensity Modulation

We propose an adaptive transmission technique for optical wireless (OW) systems, operating in atmospheric turbulence and employing subcarrier phase shift keying (S-PSK) intensity modulation. Exploiting the constant envelope characteristics of S-PSK, the proposed technique offers efficient utilization of the OW channel capacity by adapting the modulation order of S-PSK, according to the instantaneous state of turbulence induced fading and a pre-defined bit error rate (BER) requirement. Novel expressions for the spectral efficiency and average BER of the proposed adaptive OW system are presented and performance investigations under various turbulence conditions and target BER requirements are carried out. Numerical results indicate that significant spectral efficiency gains are offered without increasing the transmitted average optical power or sacrificing BER requirements in moderate-to-strong turbulence conditions.