Free space optical system performance for laser beam propagation through non Kolmogorov turbulence for uplink and downlink paths

Abstract

It is well known that free space laser system performance is limited by atmospheric turbulence. Most theoretical treatments have been described for many years by Kolmogorov's power spectral density model because of its simplicity. Unfortunately several experiments have been reported recently that show the Kolmogorov theory is sometimes incomplete to describe atmospheric statistics properly, in particular, in portions of the troposphere and stratosphere. In this paper, using a non Kolmogorov spectrum and following same procedure already used for horizontal path analysis, we extend free space optical system performance analysis to uplink and downlink paths. Our non Kolmogorov spectrum uses a generalized exponent instead of constant standard exponent value 11/3 and a generalized amplitude factor instead of constant value 0.033. Therefore, in non-Kolmogorov weak turbulence, we carry out, for a uplink and a downlink paths, analysis of Long Term Beam Spread, Scintillation index, Probability of fade, mean SNR and mean BER as variation of the spectrum exponent.