Performance of Rectangular QAM/FSO Systems

using APD Receiver over Atmospheric Turbulence

Channels
Bach T. Vu, Cong T. Truong and Anh T. Pham

Ngoc T. Dang

Computer Communications Lab.

The University of Aizu
Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima, Japan 965-8580
Emaill:{s1170270,thang,pham}@u-aizu.ac.jp

Faculty of Telecommunications
Posts & Telecommunications Institute of Technology
Hanoi, Vietnam
Email: ngocdt@ptit.edu.vn

AbstractWe theoretically analyze the performance of freespace optical (FSO) communication systems using rectangular
quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and avalanche photodiode (APD) over atmospheric turbulence channels. The lognormal fading channel is used in the analysis. We derive the
systems average symbol error rate (SER) taking into account the
APD shot noise and thermal noise, turbulence strengths, channel
distances and various system parameters. We find that using APD
can greatly benefit the performance of the system in comparison
with that of using PIN photodiode. However the selection of
APD gain is critical to the system performance. In addition, the
optimal value of APD gain also significantly depends on various
conditions of the atmospheric turbulence channels.
Index TermsFree-space optics (FSO); quadrature amplitude
modulation (QAM); avalanche photodiode (APD); atmospheric
turbulence.

I. I NTRODUCTION
In recent years, free-space optical (FSO) communication has
received much attention as an alternative solution for providing
broadband wireless communications over short distances [1,
2]. This is due to the advantages of its cost-effective, quick
and easy deployment, license-free and high data rate. There
are recently some efforts to introduce FSO to the first-mile
access environment [3].
In FSO communications, the primary factors that impact the
performance of FSO systems over horizontal paths are atmospheric attenuation and turbulence. The atmospheric attenuation, which is caused by absorption and scattering processes,
is quite variable and difficult to predict hence significantly
limiting the covering range of FSO communication systems.
Atmospheric turbulence is a phenomenon occurring as a result
of the variations in the refractive index due to inhomogeneities
in temperature and pressure changes [4]. These index inhomogeneities can deteriorate the quality of the received signal
and lead to an increase in the bit-error rate of the FSO
communication systems.
The conventional FSO communication systems have mainly
implemented by employing on-off keying (OOK) modulation
because of the simplicity and low cost. In OOK modulation,
the correct selection of adaptive thresholds is critical to the

performance. However, due to the fluctuation of the signal

intensity, adaptive threshold adjustment is difficult to be accomplished. Also, an alternative modulation technique, the
pulse position modulation (PPM), has also been studied in
FSO accomplished systems [5]. PPM has a superior power
efficiency compared to OOK, however it has a poor bandwidth
efficiency.
To overcome the limitations of OOK and PPM, sub-carrier
phase shift keying (PSK) was proposed as an alternative
modulation technique for FSO communication systems [69].
To obtain better spectral efficiency than PSK, the use of
sub-carrier quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) for FSO
communication systems has been also investigated. In [10], the
symbol error rate (SER) of rectangular QAM in Nakagami-m
fading channels was analyzed. In addition, the closed-form
expressions for average SER of FSO systems using generalorder rectangular QAM over log-normal and gamma-gamma
turbulence channels was presented in [11]. Moreover, similar
work has been done for QAM/FSO systems over K-distributed
and the negative exponential channels [12]. All above works
investigate SER versus signal to noise ratio (SNR) under the
impact of atmospheric turbulence. In these works, the impact
of atmospheric attenuation and receiver noise, however, have
not been taken into account.
In this paper, we proposed to use avalanche photodiode
(APD) receiver in rectangular QAM/FSO communication system in order to further improve its performance. We then
derive the average SER of the system taking into account
the APD shot noise, thermal noise, turbulence strengths, and
atmospheric attenuation. As various noise and atmospheric
channel parameters are considered in the analysis, our study is
more comprehensive than previous works. Moreover, we will
try to obtain more realistic results, which show the optimum
ADP gain, required transmitted power, and covering range of
FSO communication systems.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section
II describes the atmospheric turbulence channel mode. Next,
the system model and SER analysis are presented in Section
III and Section IV, respectively. Finally, Section V presents

Due to the effect of loss and scintillation, the received signal

relates to the transmitted signal as
r(t) = aX(t)s(t).

(5)

III. R ECTANGULAR QAM/FSO SYSTEMS WITH APD

RECEIVER
Fig. 1.

An channel model for QAM/FSO communication system.

the conclusions.
II. ATMOSPHERIC T URBULENCE C HANNEL M ODEL
During the propagation over atmospheric turbulence channel, the optical signals amplitude and phase are distorted by
various atmospheric interferences. In our system, we consider
two primary factors characterizing a free-space optical channel
include of channel loss and scintillation depicted in Fig. 1. The
channel loss consists of the contribution of atmospheric attenuation and geometrical loss. Where the atmospheric attenuation
is caused by both molecular absorption and aerosol scattering
suspended in the air, the geometrical loss can be calculated
as the ratio of the receiver area to the laser beam area at the
receiver. The total channel loss is given as [4]
a=

A
e(V L) ,
2
( L
)
2

(1)

where V , L, A, and are atmospheric extinction coefficient,

the channel distance between communication transmitter and
receiver, the area of the optical receiver, and the angle of
divergence in radians, respectively. X(t) is the stationary
random process for the optical signal scintillation caused by
the atmospheric turbulence. It has been known that, under
weak/moderate turbulence conditions, X(t) follows a lognormal distribution and its pdf fX (x) can be expressed as
[11]
fX (x) =

xS

[ln x +
exp
2S2
2

2
S
2
2 ]

(2)

in Eq. (2), S2 is the scintillation index, which depends on the

channels characteristics and given by Eq. (10) of [11]
"
0.4922
2
S = exp
12/5
(1 + 0.18d2 + 0.562 )7/6
#
12/5
0.5122 (1 + 0.692 )5/6
1,
(3)
+
12/5
(1 + 0.90d2 + 0.62d2 2 )
in which, d depends on the channel
p distance L and the aperture
diameter of receiver D as d = kD2 /4L, k = 2/ is the
optical wave number. The Rytov variance in case of spherical
wave propagation, 22 can be expressed as

Fig. 2. Diagram of QAM/FSO system over atmospheric turbulence channel.

A free-space optical system using rectangular QAM and

APD is depicted in Fig. 2. In the transmitter side, the binary
data is first modulated by a electrical QAM modulator. Each
block of b = log2 M data bits is separated into bI = log2 MI
in-phase data bits and bQ = log2 MQ quadrature data bits.
The in-phase data and quadrature data are mapped to one of
MI and MQ possible symbols, where M = MI MQ . The
sub-carrier converts two symbols to immediate frequency fc
afterward. The electrical QAM signal can be written as
q(t) = sI (t)cos(2fc t) sQ (t)sin(2fc t),
(6)
P
P
where sI(t)= j=ajg(tjTs) and sQ(t)= j=bj g(tjTs)
are the in-phase and quadrature signals, respectively. aj and
bj are the in-phase and the quadrature components of the
jth amplitude symbol, respectively. g(t) is the shaping pulse
and Ts denotes the symbol interval. The transmitted optical
intensity can be written as
s(t) = Ps {1+m[sI (t)cos(2fc t) sQ (t)sin(2fc t)]}, (7)
where Ps is the average transmitted power per symbol and m
is the modulation index.
At the receiver side, the telescope narrows the laser beam
and projects it toward the receiver. By substituting s(t) in Eq.
(7) into Eq. (5), The received optical intensity at the APD can
be written as
r(t) = aX(t)Ps {1+m[sI (t)cos(2fc t)sQ (t)sin(2fc t)]},
(8)
in which, the dc term Ps aX(t) can be filtered out by a
bandpass filter. The electrical intensity at the output of APD
can be expressed as

(4)

re (t) = gaX(t)Ps {m[sI (t)cos(2fc t) sQ (t)sin(2fc t)]}

+ nI (t) + nQ (t),
(9)

where Cn2 is the strength of turbulence. For horizontal path of

up to few kilometers, the value of Cn2 is taken to be a constant.

where , g denotes the APDs responsivity and average APD

gain, respectively. nI (t) and nQ (t) are noise in the QAMs

22 = 0.492Cn2 k 7/6 L11/6 ,

process, the systems average SER affected by scintillation

is defined as the general following expression
Z
SER =
SERinst fX (x)dx,
(14)
0

in which, SERinst is the instantaneous SER and is given by

Eq. (9) of [10]
SERinst = 2aI Q(AI (x)) + 2aQ Q(AQ (x))
4aI aQ Q (AI (x)) Q (AQ (x)) ,
Fig. 3.

and Q(.) is the Gaussian Q-function with

Z
t2
1
exp( )dt.
Q(y) =
2
2 y

Signal-space diagram for 8 4 rectangular QAM.

in-phase and quadrature components, respectively. When the

APD receiver is used, nI (t) and nQ (t) can be modeled as
zero mean Gaussian process whose the variances are assumed
to be the same. The total receiver noise n(t) = nI (t) + nQ (t)
is actually the total noise power of APD receiver. Supposing
dark current noise is negligible, n(t) can be given by
n(t) = iSh (t) + iT h (t),

(10)

where iSh (t) and iT h (t) are the shot noise and thermal noise,
respectively. The thermal noise is generated in the APDs
load resistance and various resistances used in pre- and main
amplifiers and iT h (t) is modeled as a stationary Gaussian
random process with variance T2 h given as [13]

T 
Fn f,
T2 h = 4kB
(11)
RL

where kB , T , RL , Fn , f denotes the Boltzmann constant,

receiver temperature in degree Kelvin, APDs load resistance,
amplifier noise factor and effective noise bandwidth, respectively. Considering the APD shot noise, it is a manifestation of
the fact that an electric current consists of a stream of electrons
that are generated at random times. The effect of scintillation
to shot noise leads to the uncertainty in shot noise variance.
Assume that the scintillation is constant in a very small time
t; i.e., X(t) = x with t0 t t + t, where t0 is a certain
time, iSh (t) can be treated as Gaussian random process with
2
variance Sh
given as [13]
2
Sh
= 2qg 2 FA axPs mf,

IV. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS

As the matter of fact, the scintillation process caused by

atmospheric turbulence can be modeled as a slow fading

(16)

In Eq. (15), aI = 1 1/MI and aQ = 1 1/MQ . AI (x) =

dI(x)/n and AQ (x) = dQ(x)/n . dI and dQ denote the
in-phase decision distance and quadrature decision distance,
respectively and relative
q to QAM signal energy Es as dI =
p
2
2 E , in which
kI Es and dQ = kQ
s
q
2 1)],
(17)
kI = 12/[(MI2 1) + 2 (MQ
and

kQ =

2 1)].
12 2 /[(MI2 1) + 2 (MQ

(18)

Here = dQ /dI is the quadrature-to-in-phase decision

distance ratio. By substituting SERinst in Eq. (15) and fX (x)
in Eq. (2) into Eq. (14), the systems average SER may be
expressed as
Z

SER = 2aI
Q(kI SN R)fX (x)dx
Z 0

(19)
+2aQ
Q(kQ SN R)fX (x)dx
0
Z

4aI aQ
Q(kI SN R)Q(kQ SN R)fX (x)dx.
0

In this equation, SN R is the instantaneous electrical signalto-noise ratio at the output of the APD photodiode, and it can
be given as
SN R =

(12)

where q denotes electron charge. FA is the excess noise factor

of the APD and is given by FA = kA g + (1 kA )(2 1/g)
with kA denotes the ionization factor. Mathematically, the total
variance of APD noise can be obtained simply by adding
individual variances of shot noise and thermal noise

T 
Fn f.
n2 = 2qg 2 FA axPs mf + 4kB
(13)
RL

(15)

g 2 2 a2 x2 Ps2 m2
.
n2

(20)

Let y =

ln x+ 2S

2S

, SER may be expressed as

2
(kI , Ps , S ) exp(y 2 )dy
SER = aI

Z
2
(kQ , Ps , S ) exp(y 2 )dy
+ aQ
(21)

Z
4
(kI , Ps , S )(kQ ,Ps ,S )exp(y 2 )dy,
aI aQ

where (z, Ps , S ) is defined as



(z, Ps , S ) = Q z SN R .

(22)

10
L = 1000 m
L = 1200 m
L = 1500 m

10

10

10

10

10

Average symbol error rate, SER

Average symbol error rate, SER

10

10

Cn2 = 1016 m2/3

Cn2 = 8 1016 m2/3
Cn2 = 1014 m2/3

10

10

10

10

10

10
0

10

20

30

40

Average APD gain, g

Note that PIN photodiode can be viewed as a special case

of APD, thus, the SER of the system using PIN photodiode
can be evaluated via Eq. (19) by selecting g = 1 and other
parameters are the same as the case of using APD.
V. N UMERICAL R ESULTS
In this section, using previously derived formulas, we
present numerical results for the performance of the FSO
communication systems using rectangular QAM and APD
over atmospheric turbulence channels. For the comparison, the
system performance in case of using PIN photodiode is also
shown. In our analysis, the average SER is evaluated as the
function of the average transmitted power per symbol Ps , the
channel distance L and the average APD gain g. Also, we fix
several key parameters, including the operational wavelength
= 1.55 m, the receivers load resistance RL = 1000 ,
the amplifier noise factor Fn = 2 and the effective noise
bandwidth f = 200 MHz. It is notable that in our system
we use f = Bs /2, where Bs is the symbol rate.
Figure 4 illustrates the SER versus average APD gain with
different channel distances and the average transmitted power
per symbol Ps = 0 dBm. The optimal APD gain in terms
of producing the lowest Pse depends on the channel distance
significantly. As shown in the figure, when the channel distance changes from 1000 m to 1500 m, the optimal APD gain
increases around 11 to 15. In addition, when the average APD
gain is larger enough, the shot noise also increases and leads
to a decrease in SER. Thus the correct selection of optimal
APD gain plays an important role in achieving the optimal
performance.
In Fig. 5 the impact of the parameter Cn2 on the SER is
depicted. The strength of turbulence for horizontal path of up
to few kilometers Cn2 depends on the weather conditions. The

20

30

40

Average APD gain, g

2 for 84
Fig. 5. SER versus average APD gain for various values of Cn
QAM, Ps = 0 dBm, = 1.

10

Average symbol error rate, SER

Fig. 4. SER versus average APD gain for various values of the channel
distance L for 84 QAM, Ps = 0 dBm, = 1.

10

APD, L = 600 m
APD, L = 800 m
APD, L = 1000 m
PIN, L = 600 m
PIN, L = 800 m
PIN, L = 1000 m

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

Transmitted power Ps (dBm)

2 =
Fig. 6. SER versus tranmitted power for 84 QAM, = 1 and Cn
1016 m2/3 .

value of Cn2 in agreement with [1] taken to be 1016 m2/3 , 8

1016 m2/3 and 1014 m2/3 for the best case, the medium
case and the worst case, respectively. When L = 1000 m
and Ps = 0 dBm, the system performance depends strongly
on the value of Cn2 . For example, with g = 10, the system
error performance Pse 109 for Cn2 = 1016 m2/3 , while
Pse 105 for Cn2 = 1014 m2/3 .
Next, Fig. 6 shows the relation between SER and the
average transmitted power per symbol Ps for systems using
APD and PIN photodiode with different values of L. It is
highlighted that APD improve approximately 8 dB the required

[2]

Average symbol error rate, SER

10

Ps
Ps
Ps
Ps
2

10

= 0 dBm
= 2 dBm
= 5 dBm
= 8 dBm

[3]

[4]
4

10

[5]
6

10

[6]
8

10

500

1000

1500

2000

Channel distance L(m)

[7]
Fig. 7. SER versus the channel distance for 84 QAM, g = 10, = 1 and
2 = 1016 m2/3 .
Cn

transmitted power per symbol, compared to PIN photodiode

at SER of 109 . Fig. 6 also shows that when the channel
distance increases by 200 m from L = 600 m to L = 800 m
or from L = 800 m to L = 1000 m requires an increase in the
transmitted power about 3 dB to achieve the SER of 109 .
Finally, in Fig. 7 we have plotted the SER versus the
channel distance with various average transmitted powers and
g = 10. Since the attenuation and scintillation effect become
longer when the channel distance increases, to achieve a
reasonable system performance, the channel distance should
no longer than a maximum value Lmax . For instance, to
achieve performance of 108 , Lmax 500 m when Ps = 8
dBm.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS
We have presented a theoretical analysis of the performance
of FSO communication systems using QAM and APD receiver
over atmospheric turbulence channels. The log-normal fading
channel is used for analyzing the SER. The numerical results
show that at the same channel distance, attenuation and
scintillation, the system using APD improve approximately 8
dB in comparison with that using PIN photodiode to achieve
the same SER. In addition, for the short distance from 1000 m
to 1500 m, the average APD gain should be selected around
11 to 15.
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