Asymptotic error-rate analysis of FSO links using transmit laser selection over gamma-gamma atmospheric turbulence...

Since free-space optical (FSO) systems are usually installed on high buildings and building sway may cause vibrations in the transmitted beam, an unsuitable alignment between transmitter and receiver together with fluctuations in the irradiance of the transmitted optical beam due to the atmospheric turbulence can severely degrade the performance of optical wireless communication systems. In this paper, asymptotic bit error-rate (BER) performance for FSO communication systems using transmit laser selection over atmospheric turbulence channels with pointing errors is analyzed. Novel closed-form asymptotic expressions are derived when the irradiance of the transmitted optical beam is susceptible to either a wide range of turbulence conditions (weak to strong), following a gamma-gamma distribution of parameters α and β, or pointing errors, following a misalignment fading model where the effect of beam width, detector size and jitter variance is considered. Obtained results provide significant insight into the impact of various system and channel parameters, showing that the diversity order is independent of the pointing error when the equivalent beam radius at the receiver is at least 2(min{α,β})(1/2) times the value of the pointing error displacement standard deviation at the receiver. Moreover, since proper FSO transmission requires transmitters with accurate control of their beamwidth, asymptotic expressions are used to find the optimum beamwidth that minimizes the BER at different turbulence conditions. Simulation results are further demonstrated to confirm the accuracy and usefulness of the derived results, showing that asymptotic expressions here obtained lead to simple bounds on the bit error probability that get tighter over a wider range of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as the turbulence strength increases.