Error performance analysis for FSO systems with diversity reception and optical preamplification over gamma–gamma atmospheric turbulence channels

Abstract

The error performance was investigated of free-space optical (FSO) systems that use optical preamplifiers and diversity reception in turbulent atmosphere with gamma–gamma distribution. More specifically, assuming that the dominant sources of the receiver noises are the background light and amplifier spontaneous emission noises, we develop an exact bit-error-rate (BER) expression for binary pulse position modulation (BPPM) by a moment-generating function (MGF) derivative-based method. To gain more insight, we also derive a closed-form asymptotic BER expression for BPPM at high received optical power, by which we obtain the diversity and coding gains of the considered systems. Our analytical results lead to the observations that the attained diversity gain only changes with the gamma-gamma distribution parameters and the number of spatial modes collected by the receiver, while independent on the number of temporal modes passed by the optical preamplifiers. We verify the analytical results by Monte Carlo simulations.