In clean ocean water, the performance of a underwater optical communication system is limited mainly by oceanic turbulence, which is defined as the fluctuations in the index of refraction resulting from temperature and salinity fluctuations. In this paper, using the refractive index spectrum of oceanic turbulence under weak turbulence conditions, we carry out, for a horizontally propagating plane wave and spherical wave, analysis of the aperture-averaged scintillation index, the associated probability of fade, mean signal-to-noise ratio, and mean bit error rate. Our theoretical results show that for various values of the rate of dissipation of mean squared temperature and the temperature-salinity balance parameter, the large-aperture receiver leads to a remarkable decrease of scintillation and consequently a significant improvement on the system performance. Such an effect is more noticeable in the plane wave case than in the spherical wave case.

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By use of the generalized von Kármán spectrum model that features both inner scale and outer scale parameters for non-Kolmogorov turbulence and the extended Rytov method that incorporates a modified amplitude spatial-frequency filter function under strong-fluctuation conditions, theoretical expressions are developed for the scintillation index of a horizontally propagating plane wave and spherical wave that are valid under moderate-to-strong irradiance fluctuations. Numerical results show that the obtained expressions also compare well with previous results in weak-fluctuation regimes. Based on these general models, the impacts of finite inner and outer scales on the scintillation index of an optical wave are examined under various non-Kolmogorov fluctuation conditions.

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A computationally efficient expression is presented for evaluating the average bit error rate (BER) of an intensity-modulation and direct-detection free-space optical system with on-off keying signaling technique operating in turbulent atmosphere described by the exponentiated Weibull distribution. The presented numerical results show the effects of aperture averaging on the average BER under weak and moderate turbulence conditions, and are confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations.