A Performance Enhancement and High Speed Spectrum Sliced Free Space Optical System Aditi Thakur 1 • Shaina Nagpal 1 • Amit Gupta 2 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract A cost effective Kerr nonlinearity based spectrum sliced (SS) WDM free space optical communication system is demonstrated under different weather instabilities. The investigated supercontinuum spectrum sliced WDM FSO system is evaluated at 2.5 Gbps up to 5 km of link distance. A highly nonlinear ﬁber is a channel for the generation of high power broad spectrum for spectrum slicing. A dense SS-WDM is investigated at 75 GHz channel spacing among 4 channels to make system bandwidth efﬁcient. The system is investigated for different line coding (return to zero, non return to zero) and advanced modulation format such as compressed spectrum return to zero. A major degrading factor in free space communication i.e. beam divergence is also analyzed for investigated work. Antenna diameters of receiver and transmitter play a vital role in FSO, thus various diameters performances are also studied. The approach is to cater the high-speed data demands and thus system deliberated and demonstrated from 2.5 to 10 Gbps. To strengthen the signal in this FSO system, three optical ampliﬁers are scrutinized such as erbium doped ﬁber ampliﬁer (EDFA), semiconductor optical ampliﬁer (SOA) and Raman ampliﬁer in terms of bit error rate and quality factor. Results revealed that EDFA is the best ampliﬁer in investigated SS-WDM-FSO system. Keywords Free space optics (FSO)  Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)  Highly nonlinear ﬁber (HNLF)  Spectrum sliced (SS)  Super continuum (SC)  Return to zero (RZ)  Non-return to zero (NRZ)  Carrier & Aditi Thakur aditiithakur89@gmail.com Shaina Nagpal nagpalshaina92@gmail.com Amit Gupta amitguptacgc@gmail.com 1 Electronics and Communication Engineering, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, Punjab 140413, India 2 Electronics and Communication Engineering, IKG PTU, Jalandhar, Punjab 144603, India 123 Wireless Pers Commun https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-018-5674-9