Atmospheric Turbulence Channel Modeling and Performance Analysis of a CO-ZP-OFDM Coherent Optical Communication System for UAV Air-to-Ground Scenarios

This paper targets the air-to-ground (A2G) data backhaul scenario of UAVs and proposes a communication system based on coherent optical zero-padding orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-ZP-OFDM), which unifies atmospheric turbulence scintillation, pointing errors, and Doppler frequency shift into a composite channel model. The system employs the Gamma-Gamma (GG) distribution to describe turbulence-induced intensity fluctuations, a Gaussian beam truncation model to characterize pointing errors, and a dual-pilot method to estimate and compensate the Doppler frequency offset. Furthermore, on a polarization-time-frequency (PTF) three-dimensional orthogonal grid pilot structure, we derive theoretical mean square error (MSE) expressions for the zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimators, and analyze their MSE characteristics under the proposed pilot model. Simulation results show that, under moderate turbulence, the shrinkage factor of the MMSE estimator yields only about 0.4 dB MSE reduction over ZF at SNR=10 dB, whereas the full receiver pipeline that combines coherence-bandwidth pilot averaging with the MMSE and maximum ratio combining (MRC) equalizer reduces the empirical MSE by approximately 15 dB. The bit error rate (BER) performance tests indicate that, under turbulence-free conditions with ideal channel estimation, the system can reduce the BER below 10−4 at an SNR of approximately 12 dB. Under strong turbulence conditions with MMSE channel estimation, the SNR cost required to achieve a BER of 10−3 is approximately 18 dB, which corresponds to a 3 to 5 dB BER gain over the ZF baseline at the same SNR. Further simulation analysis shows that the average pointing loss is highly sensitive to the angular jitter at the 1 km link distance: an angular jitter of 1 mrad incurs about 18 dB of loss, and a sub-mrad pointing stability (i.e., σjit<0.062 mrad) is required to keep the average pointing loss below 1 dB.