Performance analysis of coherent wireless optical communications with atmospheric turbulence

Coherent wireless optical communication systems with heterodyne detection are analyzed for binary phase-shift keying (BPSK), differential PSK (DPSK), and M-ary PSK over Gamma-Gamma turbulence channels. Closed-form error rate expressions are derived using a series expansion approach. It is shown that, in the special case of K-distributed turbulence channel, the DPSK incurs a 3 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty compared to BPSK in the large SNR regime. The outage probability is also obtained, and a detailed outage truncation error analysis is presented and used to assess the accuracy in system performance estimation. It is shown that our series error rate expressions are simple to use and highly accurate for practical system performance estimation.