OFDM with Index Modulation in Orbital Angular Momentum Multiplexed Free Space Optical Links

TL;DR

This paper proposes combining OFDM with index modulation to improve the performance of orbital angular momentum-based free space optical communication systems under atmospheric turbulence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel OFDM with index modulation scheme to enhance OAM FSO links, addressing turbulence-induced distortions.

Findings

Improved bit error rate performance under turbulence.

Enhanced spectral efficiency with the proposed method.

Robustness against atmospheric distortions.

Abstract

Communication using orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes has recently received a considerable interest in free space optical (FSO) communications. Propagating OAM modes through free space may be subject to atmospheric turbulence (AT) distortions that cause signal attenuation and crosstalk which degrades the system capacity and increases the error probability. In this paper, we propose to enhance the OAM FSO communications in terms of bit error rate and spectral efficiency, for different levels of AT regimes. The performance gain is achieved by introducing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with index modulation technique to the OAM FSO system.