FSO Links with Spatial Diversity over Strong Atmospheric Turbulence Channels

Free-space optical (FSO) communication has received much attention in recent years as a cost-effective, license-free and wide-bandwidth access technique for high data rates applications. The performance of FSO communication, however, severely suffers from turbulence-induced fading caused by atmospheric conditions. Multiple laser transmitters and/or receivers can be placed at both ends to mitigate the turbulence fading and exploit the advantages of spatial diversity. Spatial diversity is particularly crucial for strong turbulence channels in which single-input single-output (SISO) link performs extremely poor. Atmospheric-induced strong turbulence fading in outdoor FSO systems can be modeled as a multiplicative random process which follows the K distribution. In this paper, we investigate the error rate performance of FSO systems for K-distributed atmospheric turbulence channels and potential advantages of spatial diversity deployments at the transmitter and/or receiver. Our results demonstrate significant diversity gains of multiple transmitter/receivers deployment in FSO channels. We further present efficient approximated closed-form expressions for the average bit-error rate (BER) of multiple-input single-output (MISO) and single-input multiple-output (SIMO) FSO systems. These analytical tools are reliable alternatives to time-consuming Monte Carlo simulation of FSO systems where BER targets as low as 10^-9 are typically aimed to achieve.