No abstract

Free space optical (FSO) communication has been a subject of interest for researcher and the corporate world since a few decades ago. This has been motivated by the huge benefits associated with this technology. Meanwhile, the generation and all optical up conversion of millimeter wave (mmw) for propagation in a FSO channel has been an important research direction. In this article, a single side band tone mmw generated by the optical carrier suppression (OCS) method has been modulated by modified duo-binary return to zero (MDRZ) and polarization shift keying (PolSK) modulated baseband data. The resulting optical signal was propagated in a FSO cannel subjected to combined weather and atmospheric turbulence induced fading. Later on, a comparative analysis was carried out between hybrid OCS/MDRZ and OCS/PolSK mmw signals propagated over free space. Using the performance metrics such as the bit error rate, quality (Q) factor and the received power among others, the simulation results indicated that hybrid OCS/MDRZ performs better than hybrid OCS/PolSK.