Free-Space optical (FSO) communication is severely affected by atmospheric turbulence, causing the decrease of link stability and even link outage. We explore a new scheme to reduce the effects of atmospheric turbulence by introducing the OAM (orbital angular momentum) Hopping into FSO communication systems. In this approach, the Gaussian optical carrier is switched randomly to different spiral phase plates (SPPs) via a high-speed optical switch and is converted into the OAM beam. The switch rate is up to serval times of symbol rate, and the distribution of turbulence can be regarded as static in a symbol period. The OAM beam whose topologic charge changes randomly will experience different fading in atmospheric turbulence due to different size of waist and phase distribution, and the diversity gain is achieved during this process without additional optical antenna. The possibility of all OAM modes falling into deep fade at the same symbol period is much less than a single mode or a single Gaussian beam transmitting system, which helps to improve the link performance. According to the numerical simulation results, OAM-hopping can effectively reduce the received power fluctuations under moderate atmospheric turbulence, and the degree of improvement will become more obvious with the increase of turbulence intensity. The OAM-hopping can also be combined with traditional mitigation technologies of turbulence effects such as adaptive optics (AO) and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) to obtain further improvement.
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