Optical communication through time-varying turbulent atmosphere using compressive sensing

A novel free-space optical receiver that is based on compressive sensing (CS) was proposed by the authors in a previous work. The CS receiver provides spatial diversity by estimating the focal-plane signal distribution due to atmospheric turbulence, and using this estimate to improve detection. This paper analyzes the practical performance of the CS receiver by considering a time-varying turbulence channel model rather than the “frozen atmosphere” model previously used. Symbol-error rates are simulated for a photon counting channel and performance improvements of about 2.9 dBo can be obtained over a single-detector receiver.