A closed-form solution of the bit-error rate for optical wireless communication systems over atmospheric turbulence...

Atmospheric turbulence is a major limiting factor in an optical wireless communication (OWC) link. The turbulence distorts the phase of the propagating optical fields and limits the focusing capabilities of the telescope antennas. Hence, a detector array is required to capture the widespread signal energy in the focal-plane. This paper addresses the bit-error rate (BER) performance of optical wireless communication (OWC) systems employing a detector array in the presence of turbulence. Here, considering the gamma-gamma turbulence model, we propose a blind estimation scheme that provides the closed-form expression of the BER by exploiting the information of the data output of each pixel, which is based on the singular value decomposition of the sample matrix of the received signals after the code-matched filter. Instead of assuming spatially white additive noise, we consider the case where the noise spatial covariance matrix is unknown. The new method can be applied to either the single transmitter or the multi-transmitter cases. Simulation results for different Rytov variances are presented, which conform closely to the results of the proposed model.