Atmospheric effects on Quaternary polarization encoding for free space communication, laboratory simulation

We have simulated atmospheric effects such as fog and smoke in laboratory environment to simulate depolarisation due to atmospheric effects during a free space optical communi- cation. This has been used to study noise in two components of quaternary encoding for polarization shift keying. Individual components of a Quaternary encoding, such as vertical and horizontal as well as 45$^\circ$ and 135$^\circ$ , are tested separately and indicates that the depo- larization effects are different for these two situation. However, due to a differential method used to extract information bits, the protocol shows extremely low bit error rates. The information obtained is useful during deployment of a fully functional Quaternary encoded PolSK scheme in free space.