Mitigating Outages in a 4.6-km FSO Link via Mode-Diverse Reception: An Experimentally Validated Digital Twin Approach

Abstract

Terrestrial coherent FSO requires mitigating turbulence-induced coupling losses. We experimentally validate a "Digital Twin" channel model against fading statistics from a 4.6-km link. Combining long-term scintillometer data with mode-diverse receiver simulations, we demonstrate that a 6-mode receiver reduces turbulence-induced outage probabilities to 2.02e-5.

Accepted for presentation at European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) 2026