On the Use of Photon Arrival-Times for Non-Line-of-Sight Solar-Blind UV Channels

A non-line-of-sight (NLOS) solar-blind UV link can be modelled as a stochastic photon-limited channel with memory. There are two fundamental observations for the received photons: their instantaneous arrival times and their counts during one channel use. In this letter, we compare achievable information rates for NLOS channels with these observables under uniform, binary-input rectangular on-off keying modulation. Simulation results show that gains in information rates can be realized when photon arrival times can be observed rather than only their counts especially for highly dispersive NLOS channels.