A closed-form expression for BER of FSO links over gamma-gamma atmospheric turbulence channels with pointing errors

Abstract

FSO communication systems links is vulnerable due to degrading effects of atmospheric turbulence and point errors. We investigate the error rate performance of Free-Space Optical (FSO) links over gamma-gamma turbulence fading channels in the presence of pointing error. Assuming Intensity-Modulation/Direct Detection (IM/DD) with On-Off Keying (OOK), a novel closed-form expression for BER of FSO is derived. Another work is a study of how the BER are affected by the atmospheric turbulence and other parameters such as the normalized beamwidth, the average transmitted optical power, the normalized jitter. Numerical examples are further provided to verify the derived analytical expressions. The results show that optimizing the beamwidth can achieve the minimum BER for a given average transmitted optical power. © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.