Laguerre–Gauss and Bessel–Gauss beams propagation through turbulence: analysis of channel efficiency

As a means of increasing the channel capacity in free-space optical communication systems, two types of orbital angular momentum carrying beams, Bessel-Gauss and Laguerre-Gauss, are studied. In a series of numerical simulations, we show that Bessel-Gauss beams, pseudo-nondiffracting beams, outperform Laguerre-Gauss beams of various orders in channel efficiency and bit error rates.