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This paper investigates fading correlation in space-diversity free-space optical (FSO) communication systems and its effect on the link performance. We firstly evaluate the fading correlation in multiple-aperture FSO systems using wave-optics simulations. The influence of different system parameters including the link distance and aperture spacing is illustrated under realistic beam propagation conditions. In particular, we show that at relatively large link distances where the scattering disk is much larger than the receiver aperture size, the fading correlation coefficient is almost independent of the apertures' diameter and depends only on the apertures' edge separation. To investigate the impact of fading correlation on the system performance, we propose an analytical approach to evaluate the performance of the space-diversity FSO system over correlated Gamma-Gamma (ΓΓ) fading channel. Our approach is based on approximating the sum of arbitrarily correlated ΓΓ random variables (RVs) by an α-µ distribution. To validate the accuracy of this method, we evaluate the average bit-error-rate (BER) performance for the case of multiple-aperture FSO system and compare it with the BER results obtained via Monte-Carlo simulations.

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The efficacy of spatial diversity in practical free-space optical communication systems is impaired by the fading correlation among the underlying subchannels. We consider in this paper the generation of correlated Gamma-Gamma random variables in view of evaluating the system outage probability and bit-error-rate under the condition of correlated fading. Considering the case of receive-diversity systems with intensity modulation and direct detection, we propose a set of criteria for setting the correlation coefficients on the small- and large-scale fading components based on scintillation theory. We verify these criteria using wave-optics simulations and further show through Monte Carlo simulations that we can effectively neglect the correlation corresponding to the small-scale turbulence in most practical systems, irrespective of the specific turbulence conditions. This has not been clarified before, to the best of our knowledge. We then present some numerical results to illustrate the effect of fading correlation on the system performance. Our conclusions can be generalized to the cases of multiple-beam and multiple-beam multiple-aperture systems.