Background Radiation Cancellation for Free-Space Optical Communications with IM/DD

Besides atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors which cause the signal intensity fluctuation, background radiation also impairs the free-space optical intensity-modulation / directdetection link performance by introducing a noisy photocurrent component in the receiver. Methods such as adopting some specific optics systems, using pilot symbols or line codes to estimate the background information and cancel it accordingly, and pulse-position modulation (PPM), can be adopted to mitigate the impact of background radiation. However, purely depending on the optics system, the background radiation can only be reduced, but not completely cancelled; and the use of any of pilot symbols, line codes and PPM reduces the system spectral efficiency drastically. In this paper, based on the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) principle, we develop a Viterbi-type trellis-search sequence receiver (the GLRT sequence receiver) that can estimate the unknown channel gain and the background radiation simultaneously, and detect the data sequence accordingly. This receiver requires very few pilot symbols, and therefore, does not significantly reduce the bandwidth efficiency. Its error performance can approach that of detection with perfect information of the channel state and the background radiation, as the observation window length used for forming the decision metric increases. Since a Viterbi-type trellis-search algorithm is adopted, the search complexity is very low and is independent of the observation window size. However, the search complexity of the GLRT sequence receiver grows exponentially with the modulation order. To further simplify the implementation, we derive a more efficient decision-feedback symbol-by-symbol receiver which retains the same error performance as that of the GLRT sequence receiver.