Investigation on performance of OOK, DPSK, QDPSK in a space laser uplink communication system with the consideration of beam wander

Bit-error rate (BER) performance of on-off keying (OOK), differential phase-shift keying (DPSK), and differential quadrature phase-shift keying (QDPSK) are discussed under effect of beam wander, scintillation, and detector noise in space laser uplink communication system. Actually, DPSK performs better than OOK and QDPSK when the beam wader is considered. DPSK performs approximately 20dB better than OOK and 17dB better than QDPSK in the condition where beam wader is taken into consideration. Besides, optimum divergence angle, transmitter beam radius, zenith angle, receiving aperture are also suggested. The design of the space laser communication system can benefit from this work.