Performance of bit error rate of laser beams for LIDAR used in marine atmospheric weak turbulence

Abstract

The performance of laser beams is investigated for light detection and ranging (LIDAR) systems in marine weak atmospheric turbulence by using the Rytov method. Formulation, on-axis, of the scintillation indices of LIDAR systems, which is obtained for plane, collimated Gaussian, and spherical beams, is appraised for average bit error rate (BER) by utilizing the log-normal distributed intensity. Values, obtained for these beams, are checked against source sizes, target sizes, normalized target size parameters, propagation lengths, and the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for specified parameters. It is observed that the target size that minimizes the scintillation index is independent of the source size. The target size minimizing scintillation index is approximately 10 − 3 c m . Variations in source size and target size values, independently of each other, affect the scintillation index and the performance of marine LIDAR system links. The contribution of the outer scale turbulence to the deterioration is more evident than the inner scale turbulence.