Performance evaluation of a 2.56 Tbps DP-16QAM WDM system under various channel spacings and weather conditions using MIMO configurations

Abstract This paper proposes a 16 × 160 Gbps DP-16QAM-WDM-FSO system with 100 and 25 GHz channel spacing, utilizing coherent detection with digital signal processing to enhance the receiver sensitivity. The system’s performance is evaluated under different climate circumstances, such as dust, rain, and fog. The MIMO technique with 2 × 2, 4 × 4, and 8 × 8 configurations are suggested to mitigate weather attenuation effects. Performance metrics, including bit error rate (BER), error vector magnitude (EVM %), quality factor (Q-factor), and optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR), are utilized to evaluate the system’s performance. Results show that the proposed system increases the maximum transmission distance by 12.67 %–49.33 %, 19.17 %–78.66 %, and 25.68 %–108 % for all weather circumstances when utilizing 2 × 2 MIMO, 4 × 4 MIMO, and 8 × 8 MIMO, respectively. Moreover, while reducing channel spacing improves the system’s spectral efficiency from 1.6 to 6.4 bits/s/Hz, it also degrades the link range and requires an increased OSNR. A performance comparison between our work and related works is also considered in this paper.