Simulation method of spatial laser field for arbitrary distance optical transmission with carbon nanotube

•Simulating any transmission distance for FSO communication by using a CNT.•Solving the problem that the transmission distance getting increasingly longer.•Including the theoretical model of the optical transmission method with any distance.

In this paper, an arbitrary distance optical transmission simulation method for free-space optical communication system is presented. Based on this method, direct point-to-point performance tests between two optical terminals can be realized in the laboratory, and the test results are equivalent to those on-orbit. A theoretical analysis of this method is presented in this paper. Verification experiments showed that there is a good linearity between the incoming power density and output photocurrent of the carbon nanotube (CNT); the relative power difference between the CNT and the charge-coupled device (CCD) camera is 4.75%, which can be ignored compared with the link redundancy.