Analysis of capacity and outage probability for intersatellite optical communications in the presence of random pointing jitter

This work is motivated by the need to achieve the Shannon channel capacity for intersatellite optical communication with intensity modulation and direct detection. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between the channel capacity and the outage probability in the presence of random pointing jitter for intersatellite optical links. First, we derive an analytical expression of the outage probability in the absence of bias error, and then the bias error is taken into account. By minimizing the outage probability, we obtain analytically the optimum design of the beam half-width divergence angle w ₀ ^opt for a given channel code rate. Furthermore, we discuss the tradeoff between the outage probability and the channel capacity and illustrate the results by adopting w ₀ ^opt in the presence of random pointing jitter. The results obtained are useful for the parametric-estimation optimization of intersatellite optical communication systems.