ICIAS 2010: International Conference on Intelligent and Advanced Systems

Binary Pulse Position Modulation Simulation System in Free Space Optical Communication Systems
Electrical & Electronic Engineering Department, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, MALAYSIA Tel: +605-368-8000 Fax: +605-365-7443 2 Research and Development Unit, Universiti Malaysia Perlis 01000 Kangar, Perlis, MALAYSIA Tel: +04-9798784 Fax: +04-9798790 nurizan.tahir@gmail.com, naufal_saad@petronas.com.my, brahim_balhaouari@petronas.com.my, drvirander_jain@petronas.com.my, syedalwee@unimap.edu.my
1

N. Tahir1, N. Mohamad Saad1, B. B. Samir1, V. K. Jain1, S. A. Aljunid2

AbstractFree space optical communication system (FSO) is a potential solution for increasing bandwidth demands. The FSO has a capability to provide high speed data communication, economic and quick deployable. Although FSO has several advantages, but at the same time FSO faces a major challenge from scintillation introduced by atmospheric turbulence. In this paper, the simulation performance for the binary pulse position modulation (BPPM) system is done under weak and strong atmospheric turbulence. The performances are analyze in terms of bit error rate (BER) and eye diagrams. The system use avalanched photodiode (APD) receiver. The simulation was verified with ideal calculated performance for BPPM. The results show the simulation system is capable to give the BER similar like mathematical model and give the optimum gain of APD to achieve the best BER in atmospheric turbulence environment. The optimum gain for APD result from the simulation for weak turbulence is 150-165 and 160 for strong turbulence. Index TermsAtmospheric Turbulence, Avalanche Photodiode, Binary Pulse Position Modulation, Free Space Optical Communication Systems.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Free space optical communication systems (FSO) is an optical communication that uses laser light to transmit data between two points. The laser light propagates in free space so that this technology becomes the best solution to overcome the problems occurred by using optical fiber. Systems of FSO can function over distances of several kilometers as long as there is a clear line of sight between the transmitter and the receiver, communication is theoretically possible. Even if there is no direct line of sight, strategically positioned mirrors can be used to reflect the energy. The beams can pass through clean glass windows with little or no attenuation. FSO typically currently used intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) since this system associated with complexity of phase and frequency modulation [1]. However, in practice, the performance of FSO can be degraded and scintillation induced by atmospheric

turbulence as a major impairment. Atmospheric turbulence happens due to variations in the index or refraction caused by temperature fluctuation. The impact of atmospheric turbulence is it can cause random variations in signal intensity. The turbulence is classified as weak when scintillation index is less than 0.75 while scintillation index of 1 represents a strong turbulence [8]. Generally, scintillation index is a complicated function of the beam parameters, propagation distance, height of the transmitter and receiver, and the fluctuations in the index of refraction [2]. A system using PPM is better than On Off Keying (OOK) because PPM is power efficient compared to OOK since satellite communication links required the large peak laser power level to survive huge losses during transmission [4]. The presence of a pulse in the symbol frame regardless of the transmitted symbol benefits the clock recovery subsystem, whereas an On-Off Keying (OOK) system may suffer synchronization loss if a sequence of zeros is encountered [6]. However the current technology, Q-switched laser cannot be toggled between on and off states at a very high rate. This scenario automatically is limiting the data rate that can be supported using OOK transmission scheme. Avalanche photodiodes (APD) are used to boost the signal level over additive noise level present at the receiver [4]. This is because the signal received by the detector is attenuated due to large distances and effect from the atmosphere. APD will magnify each incident photon to a high number of randomly distributed postdetection electrons. An APD can provide mean gain values in the range 50 to 200 [1]. In BPPM systems, they will increase the bit error rate (BER) since APD will produce excess noise factor. This excess noise factor was affected by APD gain and ionization factor of APD. In other word, there is very important to use suitable gain of APD in FSO systems since APD gain leads to an increase of excess noise factor and ultimately reducing the BER. This paper will discuss the details about BPPM in section II. It is consists the format of BPPM system, the

ICIAS 2010: International Conference on Intelligent and Advanced Systems

photodetection process and the probability of word error. The simulation system of PPM using APD with atmospheric turbulence is briefly described in section III. In section IV, this paper shows results of simulation systems including the simulation signals; the clock signal, the information signal, the BPPM modulated signal and the detected signal at the receiver. II. BINARY PULSE POSITION MODULATION

determining the probability that a given bit of the word will be incorrect after incorrect decoding. If incorrectly decoded word is equally likely to be any of the remaining word, then a given bit will be decoded as any of the bits in the same position of each word. In two equally bit patterns, a given bit position will be a one or zero one times. In summary, the probability of a given bit being in error is this probability times the probability that the word was in error. III. SIMULATION SYSTEM MODEL The modulator is built to perform the random data signals into PPM format. A clock is added to make the random data coded. Pulse will coded as zero when the clock strikes and it does not receive signal until one cycle later. While when the clock strikes and received a signal, the pulse will be coded as one. Then the demodulator will recover the modulated data. Electrical rescale is used to scale the maximum and minimum values of the input signals. The oscilloscope is used to monitor the signal so that the signal is modulated in the PPM format. The modulated signal is transmitted using laser with wavelength of 1550 nanometer. The medium used FSO link with affected atmospheric turbulence. Since the atmospheric turbulence usually expressed in terms of normalized intensity variance or scintillation index [7], the Rytov approximation is used to get the turbulence strength in m-2/3 unit. By using the Rytov relationship, the turbulence strength will be performed in optical signal attenuation in dB/km.

In BPPM, two bits are transmitted in block instead of one at a time. The block is called a BPPM frame. Optical pulse is placed in one of two adjacent time slots to represent the data block. The optical block encoding is achieved by converting each block of two bits into one of optical fields for transmission. At the receiver, decoding of each block is achieved by determining which of the fields is being received during each block time. The optical PPM direct detection receiver block diagram is shown in Fig. 1[1]. At receiver, PPM decoder must decide which one of the slots occurring during a frame time contains the optical pulse. The incoming field is photodetected, and slot integration is made for each slot time by a synchronized slot clock. The sequence of slot integrations, (v1,v2,,vM) collected over a frame time are then compared for the maximum, with the largest one identifying the signal slot for that frame. This maximum comparison among the slot values is in fact the decoding test producing the minimum probability of a decoding error. Decoding word error happens when incorrect slot produces a higher integration value than the correct slot. The integrators densities depend on photodetection model.

(a)

Fig. 2. BPPM system simulation model

(b) Fig. 1. Binary Pulse Position Modulation format. (a) Encoder. (b) Receiver and decoder

The probability word error (PWE) represents the probability of decoding the incorrect PPM pulse position. But, the incorrect decoded word may still produce some correct bits. The bit error probability (PE) is different from the PWE. This relation can be obtained by

In the receiver part, APD is used as a photodetector. The gain of APD varies from 50 to 200 to get the best BER in turbulence FSO channel. The ionization factor is fixed to 0.028 for all simulation done. The dark current of APD in this simulation system is 10 nano Ampere while the responsivity is 70 A/W. The main reason of using APD is because this photodetector has more sensitivity than PIN receiver, making so that it suitable to use for long distance.

ICIAS 2010: International Conference on Intelligent and Advanced Systems

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The oscilloscopes are used to monitor the signal so that the simulation system model is in BPPM format. The bit rate for this system is 2.4 Giga bit per second (Gbps) when the noise temperature is in room temperature. The figures below show the simulation signals. They included the clock signal, the information signal, the BPPM modulated signal and the detected signal at the receiver.

(a)

(b)

BER, the scintillation index of 0.35 shows smaller BER than scintillation index 0.55. As expected, the increasing atmospheric turbulence results in an increase in the required signal level to achieve the same performance. To determine the best APD gain for weak turbulence, the simulation system model is done for three scintillation indexes, which are scintillation index 0.20, 0.35 and 0.55. Figure 5 shows the results of BER versus APD gain for various scintillation indexes. The graph shows the improvement of BER with increasing APD gain. But, at APD gain more than 170, the BER starts to increase. This is because the large APD gain leads to an increase in excess noise factor, and resulting the increase of BER. In Figure 6, the result for strong turbulence is done for various APD gain to find the best one. As expected, the trend of the graph follows the trends of weak turbulence but with bigger BER. The excess noise factor caused by large gain of APD is verified in this simulation. For strong atmospheric turbulence, the best of APD gain is in the area of 160. The major effect that affects the BER for BPPM system is excess noise factor of photodetector, while other parameters are constant. It is very important to get the best value of APD gain so that the FSO systems will perform the best BER for atmospheric turbulence scenario.

(c)

Eye diagram for scintillation index 0.35 Eye height 2.8097X10-6 Minimum BER 6.8197X10-6

(a) (d) Fig. 3. BPPM simulation signals. (a) The clock signal. (b) The information signal. (c) The modulated BPPM signal. (d) The detected signal at receiver

The simulation is performed for several of APD gain from the range 50 to 200. All the simulation is divided by two scenarios, which are for weak turbulence and strong turbulence. For weak turbulence, the scintillation index is in the range of 0 to 0.75 while for strong turbulence, the scintillation index is 1. In this paper, the simulations for weak turbulence are done for scintillation index 0.2, 0.35 and 0.55. The simulation system performance is monitored using eye diagram analyzer. From this analyzer, we also get the value for eye height and minimum BER for the simulation system. Figure 4 (a) and (b) shows the eye diagram for scintillation index 0.35 and 0.55. The other parameters are remaining fixed. For scintillation index 0.35, the eye height of eye diagram is bigger than eye height for scintillation index 0.55 for the same APD gain. While for

Eye diagram for scintillation index 0.55 Eye height 1.1860X10-6 Minimum BER 1.6245X10-4

(b) Fig. 4. (a) The eye diagram for scintillation index 0.35. (b) The eye diagram for scintillation index 0.55

ICIAS 2010: International Conference on Intelligent and Advanced Systems

Therefore, the major contribution from this paper is in designing a simulation system model for M-ary PPM in weak and strong turbulence channel using the same software. The simulation and numerical result will be compared to see the performance of BPPM in FSO channel. The simulation was verified with ideal calculated performance for BPPM. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This research has been supported by the Postgraduate Office of Universiti Teknologi Petronas.
Fig. 5. BER vs APD gain for various scintillation index of weak turbulence for BPPM simulation system [1]

REFERENCES
Robert M. Gagliardi and Sherman Karp, Optical Communications, John Wiley & sons Inc., Second Edition, 1995. [2] Kamran Kiasaleh, Performance of APD-Based, PPM FreeSpace Optical Communication Systems in Atmospheric Turbulence, IEEE Trans. on Communications, vol.53, no. 9,September 2005 [3] S. Karp, R.M Gagliardi, S.E Mohan, and L.B Stotts, Optical Channels, New York, Plenum Press, 1988. [4] Kamran Kiasaleh, Tsun Yee Yan and Meera Srinivan, TrellisCoded Pulse Position Modulation for Optical Communication Systems Impaired by Pulsewidth Inaccuracies, Journal of Lightwave Technology, Vol. 17, pp. 1336-1346, No. 8, August 1999. [5] Heba Yuksel, Christopher C. Davis and Linda Wasicko, Aperture Averaging Experiment for Optimizing Receiver Design and Analyzing Turbulence on Free Space Optical Communication, CTuG4 Conference on Lasers & ElectroOptics (CLEO), 2005. [6] Jagtar Singh and V.K Jain, Performance Analysis of BPPM and M-ary PPM Optical Communication Systems in Atmospheric Turbulence, IETE Technical Review, Vol.25, Issue 4, July-Aug 2008. [7] S. Karp, R. M. Gagliardi, S. E. Moran, and L. B. Scotts, Optical Channels, New York, Plenum Press, 1988 [8] V. W. S. Chan, Coding for the Turbulent Atmospheric Optical Channel, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 1, pp. 269-275, Jan 1982. [9] Marvin K. Simon and Mohamed Slim Alouni, Digital Communication Over Fading Channels, Wiley Series in Telecommunications and Signal Processing, John G. Proakis, Series Editor, 2000. [10] Bernard Sklar, Digital Communications: Fundamentals and Applications, Second Edition, Prentice Hall International Inc., 2001

Fig. 6. BER vs APD gain for strong turbulence BPPM simulation system

IV. CONCLUSION The simulation system of BPPM for weak and strong turbulence channel are successfully done using Optic Software (OptiSys). The results show perfect simulation signals included the clock signal, the information signal, the BPPM modulated signal and the signal detected at the receiver. The results also show the graph for BER in different gain of APD and various scintillation index of atmospheric turbulence.