Performance of an adaptive phase estimator for coherent free-space optical communications over Gamma-Gamma turbulence

This paper investigates an adaptive phase estimator for coherent free-space optical (FSO) communication systems. Closed-form solutions for variance of phase errors are derived when the optical beam is subjected to Gamma-Gamma distributed turbulence. The adaptive phase estimator has improved upon the phase error performance in comparison to conventional phase estimators. We also demonstrate notable improvement in BER performance when applying our adaptive phase estimator to coherent FSO communication systems.