Performance of an Outdoor Optical Wireless Communication Channel Through Gamma-Gamma Turbulence at Different Frequency

Abstract

Optical wireless communication is an alternative to RF communication due to its high data rate but outdoor optical wireless communication is limited by the atmospheric turbulence. Any variation in refractive index causes fluctuation in the received signal. This is called scintillation and this scintillation causes the fluctuation in phase as well the intensity of the received signal, which results in degrade the performance of an outdoor OWC channel. In this paper, a unified performance analysis of an optical wireless communication link for an atmospheric turbulent channel under gamma-gamma model is addressed. An optimum free-space channel is designed in the OptiSystem software and to evaluate the system performance numerical results are provided for bit error rate and quality factor under weak, medium, and strong turbulence regime. Also, the system is evaluated at different frequencies to study the error performance of the system.