FSO communication is a viral technology among optical wireless communications, gathering the interest of both researchers and manufacturers. This is because of the many advantages associated with FSO communication, including high data rates, reliability, safety, and economy. However, there are several unavoidable drawbacks that shadow the performance of FSO systems. For example, atmospheric turbulence is a well-known problem related to the weather conditions of the channel, which causes the scintillation effect. Also, spatial jitter due to pointing errors is a critical factor of the link’s performance, caused by occasional misalignments between the transmitter and the receiver. Moreover, time jitter is another limiting agent that deteriorates the total throughput, inducing bit stream misdetections, caused by the arrival of out-of-sync pulses. All three effects have been exhaustively studied and many statistical models and interesting solutions have been proposed in the literature to estimate their magnitude and compensate for their impact. In this work, the turbulence effect was treated by Málaga distribution, the spatial jitter effect was regulated by the non-zero boresight model, and the time jitter effect was modeled by the generalized Gaussian distribution. Various modulation schemes were studied, along with DF multi-hop and optimal combining diversity techniques at the receiver’s end. New, accurate mathematical expressions of average BER performance have been obtained, and valuable conclusions were drawn thanks to the presented numerical results.
FSO communications tend to be one of most convenient, wireless, high-data-rate communications technologies of global telecom networking, and they are implemented and operated with low-cost resources. Despite their advantages, FSO systems’ performance is delimited by several physical phenomena, which act on propagating signal beams through the atmospheric path. Among other effects, chromatic dispersion and time jitter affect the shape and the detection instant of the incoming optical pulse, respectively. This results in signal fading and probable misdetections, and the signal fades along the propagation path due to power losses. Particularly, chromatic dispersion affects the width of the longitudinal information pulse, while the stochastic nature of the time jitter effect is treated with the use of a statistical model for the instantly received irradiance of the detecting pulse at the corresponding time slot. In this study, the symmetrical Laplace distribution was chosen for weak time jitter effect emulation because of its symmetry in pulse detection before or after the center of the specific timeslot. Thus, the joint influence of all three effects could considered, including all the parameters involved. Moreover, new-closed-form mathematical expressions were derived in order to accurately estimate the availability and the reliability of the FSO links under consideration. Next, using the derived mathematical forms, performance outcomes were presented for typical parameter values for realistic FSO links.
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