A Hybrid Wave Front Correction Method for Sensor-less Adaptive Optics in Free Space Optical Communication.

Sensor-less adaptive optics (AO) technology is an effective method to compensate the wave front distortion caused by atmospheric turbulence in free space optical communication (FSOC) system. In general, a lot of iterations are required to update the control voltage vector step by step for the stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm which is a conventional and often considered model-free algorithm. The newly developed model-based algorithms have certain constraints and difficulties for the construction of the models. Therefore, in order to develop a rapid wave front distortion compensation algorithm with better performance, we present a hybrid method which combines a model-based algorithm presented by Martin J. Booth and SPGD algorithm to correct the low-order aberration and high-order aberration respectively. Simulations show that this hybrid method can compensate wave front aberrations with higher convergence speed than that of SPGD algorithm and finally reach higher Strehl ratio (SR) and better bit error rate (BER) with same iterations, particularly under strong turbulence. This result means that our hybrid method can improve coupling efficiency and quality of FSOC system.