Relay-Assisted Free-Space Optical Communications

Abstract

The atmospheric lightwave propagation is considerably influenced by the random variations in the refractive index of air pockets due to turbulence. This undesired effect significantly degrades the performance of free-space optical (FSO) communication systems. Interestingly, the severity of such random degradations is highly related to the range of atmospheric propagation. In this thesis, we introduce relay-assisted FSO communications as a very promising technique to combat the degradation effects of atmospheric turbulence. Considering different configurations of the relays, we quantify the outage behavior of the relay-assisted system and identify the optimum relaying scheme. We further optimize the performance of the relay-assisted FSO system subject to some power constraints and provide optimal power control strategies for different scenarios under consideration. Moreover, an application of FSO relaying technique in quantum communications is investigated. The results demonstrate impressive performance improvements for the proposed relay-assisted FSO systems with respect to the conventional direct transmission whether applied in a classical or a quantum communication channel.