Improving system performance by using adaptive optics and aperture averaging for laser communications in oceanic turbulence

We theoretically investigate the effectiveness of adaptive optics correction for Gaussian beams affected by oceanic turbulence. Action of an idealized adaptive optics system is modeled as a perfect removal of a certain number of Zernike modes from the aberrated wavefront. We focused on direct detection systems and we used the aperture-averaged scintillation as the main metric to evaluate optical system performances. We found that, similar to laser beam propagation in atmospheric turbulence, adaptive optics is very effective in improving the performance of laser communication links if an optimum aperture size is used. For the specific cases we analyzed in this study, scintillation was reduced by a factor of ∼7 when 15 modes were removed and when the aperture size of the transceiver was large enough to capture 4-5 speckles of the oceanic turbulence-affected beam.