Estimation of capacity bounds of free space optical channels under strong turbulence conditions

The last few years, the free space optical communication systems attracting research and commercial interest due to their capability of transferring data, over short distances, with high rate and security, with low cost demands and without licensing fees. The main disadvantage of these systems is that their performance depends strongly on the atmospheric conditions in the link´s area. In this work, we investigate the influence of the turbulence on both the average and the outage capacity of such a system for strong turbulence channels modeled by the K-distribution. We present a novel closed-form expression for the estimation of outage capacity of the channel and we determine the practical bounds of wireless optical channels´ capacity.