Spatial Jitter Influence on the Average BLER Performance of SIMO FSO Links over Atmospheric Turbulence Channels

Abstract

In the recent years, Free Space Optics (FSO) technology has attracted significant research and commercial interest mostly because of its many advantages in comparison with other radio systems used for point-to-point connections. However, the reliable operation of these systems significantly depends on the conditions of the atmosphere in the area in which the optical beam propagates. The most important of these conditions are atmospheric turbulence and the misalignment between the optical beam and the receiver, which is also known as the pointing errors effect. In this work, in order to obviate the performance mitigation caused by these phenomena, we examined the most widely accepted and one of the most effective techniques, i.e., the implementation of receivers’ diversity. Various metrics have been investigated to evaluate the performance of such systems, but most of them do not take into account that the ultra-fast modern optical communication systems use blocks of bits for the transmission and codes for the detection and/or correction of erroneous bits. Thus, by taking these aspects into account, in this work, we investigated the combined impact of spatial jitter and atmospheric turbulence on the total average block error rate of an optical wireless system with receivers’ diversity. Novel closed-form analytical formulas were derived.