Verification of QAM based Photon-Counting Wireless Communication Using simulated single Photon Pulses by FPGA

In order to realize the debugging of the code without the help of the real underwater environment, we designed a system that can simulate the single photon pulse by using FPGA. When verifying whether the simulation system can realize communication, we apply it to the 16QAM communication system, which has a transmission rate of 1KHz and a local carrier signal of 10KHz.The experimental results show that the simulation system can generate single-photon signals obeying the Poisson distribution and realize normal communication, with a minimum symbol error rate(SER) of 0 and a maximum rate of 0.0004 when receiving 10000 data. When exploring the effect of dark count and dead time on the communication quality, the counting rate of dark count does not affect the communication quality within a certain range, but the SER increases dramatically beyond 12573 cps. The SER of the system first increases slowly with the increase of dead time, and then shows an approximate rapid increase when the dead time exceeds 180ns.