Bit-error-rate performance of semiconductor optical amplifiers in negative exponential fading

We present analytical relations for estimating the bit-error-rate performance of semiconductor optical amplifier assisted outdoor optical wireless systems in the presence of negative-exponential fading. The relations are derived by associating the optical signal and noise powers with the channel state and are utilized to assess the system performance in terms of first and order statistics. We demonstrate that both first order (average bit-error-rate and outage probability) and second order (average fade duration) statistics are improved by a significant factor, since the deployment of the amplifier leads to a considerably reduced receiver sensitivity.