Experimental Demonstration of a Hybrid Link for Mitigating Atmospheric Turbulence Effects in Free-Space Optical Communication

Atmospheric turbulence causes severe performance degradation in free-space optical communication links. However, by using a reliable low-bandwidth wireline or RF link in parallel, the performance of such links can be improved significantly. This is achieved by using error correction codes at the transmitter and decoding the received data jointly over the two links at the receiver. Our work describes the feasibility study of such a hybrid link. It is observed that a 10% use of the wireline link can result in more than 8-dB performance gain in the optical link.