Performance analysis of FSO communications over a generalized turbulence fading channel with pointing error

Summary Quantitatively assessing the performance of free space optical (FSO) communication systems requires an accurate description of turbulence induced fading. However, it is well known that common irradiance distributions inaccurately model intensity tail regions. Recently, a general fading model as the product of arbitrary number of Gamma with inverse Gamma was proposed and shown to accurately predict measurements, besides containing many well‐known models as special cases. This paper is concerned with analyzing the effect of discrepancies among different fading distributions on optical system performance in terms of bit error rates and capacity. Based on the general fading model a unified analysis of the channel structure effects on FSO communications in the presence of turbulence and pointing error is presented. The outage probability is investigated for both homodyne and direct detection schemes. Closed form expressions for the average probability of bit error for intensity modulation, phase shift keying and polarization shift keying, single‐input‐single‐output systems are given and verified by Monte‐Carlo simulations. Spatial diversity is also studied through single‐input‐multiple‐output systems. Also, the ergodic capacity is derived. Comparisons between the proposed distributions and other widely used distributions are carried out and show significant differences among existing fading models. This suggests possible improvements in the spectral efficiency and error performance design of optical wireless communication systems.