Computationally efficient long-distance free-space optical simulation using a continuous-scaling angular spectrum method.

Authors

Chaoxu Chen, Haoyu Zhang, Yuan Wei, Fang Dong, Junwen Zhang, Nan Chi, Haiwen Cai, Wei Chu, Jianyang Shi

Published in

Optics letters. Volume 51. Issue 15. Pages 4256-4259. Aug 01, 2026.

Abstract

We propose a continuous-scaling angular spectrum (CSAS) method for efficient long-distance free-space optical (FSO) propagation simulation. By combining multistep propagation with continuously updated sampling intervals, the method maintains a constant sampling size and avoids the large computational grids required by conventional angular spectrum (AS) approaches. Under an aperture-limited framework, only the spatial-frequency components contributing to the received optical power (ROP) are preserved, and a low-frequency energy ratio is introduced to quantify the relevant spectral content. Numerical simulations and a 4.3 km outdoor FSO experiment demonstrate that CSAS provides consistent ROP estimation compared with conventional AS, while significantly reducing computational cost. At a propagation distance of 4.3 km, the proposed method achieves approximately 98% reduction in computation time without degrading power estimation performance. The results indicate that CSAS offers an efficient propagation framework for long-distance FSO systems, particularly for scenarios involving multi-step turbulence modeling and system-level evaluation.

PMID:
42537163
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 01 Aug 2026.

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