Optimizing deep-space optical communication under power constraints
arXiv:1801.03947 · doi:10.1117/12.2289653
Abstract
We investigate theoretically the efficiency of deep-space optical communication in the presence of background noise. With decreasing average signal power spectral density, a scaling gap opens up between optimized simple-decoded pulse position modulation and generalized on-off keying with direct detection. The scaling of the latter follows the quantum mechanical capacity of an optical channel with additive Gaussian noise. Efficient communication is found to require a highly imbalanced distribution of instantaneous signal power. This condition can be alleviated through the use of structured receivers which exploit optical interference over multiple time bins to concentrate the signal power before the detection stage.
10 pages, 5 figures, To be presented at the SPIE Photonics West Conference on Free-Space Laser Communication and Atmospheric Propagation, San Francisco, CA, 29-30 January 2018
References in corpus (5)
- A Quantum Pulse Gate based on Spectrally Engineered Sum Frequency Generation
- From quantum pulse gate to quantum pulse shaper -- enigneered frequency conversion in nonlinear optical waveguides
- Multi-state discrimination below the quantum noise limit at the single-photon level
- Multi-Phase Hadamard receivers for classical communication on lossy bosonic channels
- Incoherent on-off keying with classical and non-classical light