Generalized Blind Detection of OOK Modulation for Free-Space Optical Communication

For optimal detection of ON-OFF keying symbols in free-space optical (FSO) communication, the receiver requires the instantaneous channel fading coefficient. In this letter, to increase the bandwidth efficiency of the FSO channel, we propose a blind data detection method, i.e., without requiring transmission of any training symbols. The proposed blind detection is a two-step method that performs block-by-block detection. Simulation results show that the proposed receiver can achieve a significantly lower bit-error-rate performance compared with the existing blind methods in the context of FSO communications. In addition, the proposed blind method has a simple structure, which makes it particularly suitable for fast FSO communications.