MIMO free-space optical communication employing coherent BPOLSK modulation in atmospheric optical turbulence channel with pointing errors

Abstract

An optical wireless communication system is an alternative to radio frequency communication, but atmospheric turbulence induced fading and misalignment fading are the main impairments affecting an optical signal when propagating through the turbulence channel. The resultant of misalignment fading is the pointing errors, it degrades the bit error rate (BER) performance of the free space optics (FSO) system. In this paper, we study the BER performance of the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) FSO system employing coherent binary polarization shift keying (BPOLSK) in gamma–gamma (G–G) channel with pointing errors. The BER performance of the BPOLSK based MIMO FSO system is compared with the single-input single-output (SISO) system. Also, the average BER performance of the systems is analyzed and compared with and without pointing errors. A novel closed form expressions of BER are derived for MIMO FSO system with maximal ratio combining (MRC) and equal gain combining (EGC) diversity techniques. The analytical results show that the pointing errors can severely degrade the performance of the system.