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2026-08-12
Comparative Performance Evaluation of OOK, DPSK, and Optical OFDM in an EDFA-Assisted 8-Channel WDM-FSO System
By
Progress In Electromagnetics Research C, Vol. 172, 286-300, 2026
Abstract
Free Space Optical (FSO) communication is a high-capacity optical wireless technology for terrestrial backhaul, interbuilding connectivity, and rapidly deployable networks, but fog attenuation, turbulence, and beam-divergence-induced spreading degrade link reliability. This paper evaluates an impairment-aware erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA)-assisted 8-channel, wavelength division multiplexing free-space optical (WDM-FSO) system using On-Off Keying (OOK), Differential Phase Shift Keying (DPSK), and Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (Optical OFDM). The system uses eight C-band wavelengths from 1552 nm to 1566 nm with 2 nm spacing, each carrying 10 Gbps, and employs a fixed 20 dB EDFA gain for attenuation compensation. Beer-Lambert propagation loss, the Kim visibility-based fog model, log-normal and Gamma-Gamma turbulence models, beam-divergence-induced geometric spreading, WDM filter isolation, laser launch-power fluctuation, and receiver-side DSP-assisted normalization are considered. RSoft OptSim simulations are performed over 1-8 km link distances and 50-500 m visibility. Performance is evaluated using bit error rate (BER), Q-factor, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Under the specified simulation assumptions, Optical OFDM achieves the best performance among the compared schemes, with 1.0 × 10-9 BER at 10 Gbps and 1.2 × 10-6 BER, 4.72 Q-factor, and 17.0 dB SNR at 8 km.
Citation
Tejas Patel, Shailesh Khant, and Atul Patel, "Comparative Performance Evaluation of OOK, DPSK, and Optical OFDM in an EDFA-Assisted 8-Channel WDM-FSO System," Progress In Electromagnetics Research C, Vol. 172, 286-300, 2026.
doi:10.2528/PIERC26061502
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