Outage performance of switch-and-examine combining receiver over FSO Gamma-Gamma atmospheric turbulence with pointing errors

This paper presents the outage probability analysis of free-space optical (FSO) system with the switch-and-examine combining (SEC) receiver. In addition, the modification of SEC, called switch-and-examine combining with post-examining selection (SECps), is also analyzed. The intensity fluctuations of the received optical signal are accounted for both Gamma-Gamma atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors. The influence of the atmospheric turbulence parameters, as well as the normalized beam width and normalized jitter, on the outage probability performance is observed. Also, the effects of the switching and outage threshold and the number of the SEC and SECps diversity apertures on the FSO performance are discussed.