IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 6, NO. 8, AUGUST 2007 2813
BER Performance of Free-Space Optical Transmission with
Spatial Diversity
S. Mohammad Navidpour, Member, IEEE, Murat Uysal, Member, IEEE, and Mohsen Kavehrad, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— Free space optical (FSO) communications is a
cost-effective and high bandwidth access technique, which has
been receiving growing attention with recent commercialization
successes. A major impairment in FSO links is the turbulence-
induced fading which severely degrades the link performance. To
mitigate turbulence-induced fading and, therefore, to improve the
error rate performance, spatial diversity can be used over FSO
links which involves the deployment of multiple laser transmit-
ters/receivers. In this paper, we investigate the bit error rate
(BER) performance of FSO links with spatial diversity over log-
normal atmospheric turbulence fading channels, assuming both
independent and correlated channels among transmitter/receiver
apertures. Our analytical derivations build upon an approxima-
tion to the sum of corr elated log-normal random variables. The
derived BER expressions quantify the effect of spatial diversity
and possible spatial correlations in a log-normal channel.
Index Terms— Atmospheric turbulence, bit error rate, error
rate performance analysis, free space optical communication, log-
normal channel, MIMO.
I. INTRODUCTION
F
REE-SPACE optical (FSO) communications is a cost-
effective, license-free, and high b andwidth access tech-
nique, which has attracted significant attention recently for a
variety of applications [1]-[4]. Despite the major advantages
of FSO communications, its widespread use is hampered
by several challenges in practical deployment. For example,
aerosol scattering caused by rain, snow, and fog results in
performance degradations, leaving the FSO link vulnerable to
adverse weather conditions [5]. Another possible impairment
over FSO links is building-sway as a result of wind loads,
thermal expansion, and weak earthquakes [6], [7]. A major
impairment is the effect of atmospheric turbulence [8], which
will be the focus of this paper. Atmospheric turbulence occurs
as a result of the variations in the refractive index due to
inhomogeneties in temperature and pressure changes. This
results in rapid fluctuations at the received signal, i.e., signal
fading, impairing the link performance severely. Although
Manuscript received February 11, 2006; revised September 15, 2006
and January 26, 2007; accepted January 28, 2007. The associate editor
coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for publication was X.
Wang. This paper was presented in part at IEEE VTC’04-Fall, Los Angeles,
California, USA, September 2004. The work of S. M. Navidpour and M.
Kav e hrad is supported in part by a DARPA Grant sponsored by the U.S.
Air Force Research Laboratory/Wright-Patterson AFB Contract-FA8650-04-
C-7114 and The Pennsylvania State University CICTR. The work of M. Uysal
is supported in part by an NSERC Special Opportunity Grant (SROPJ305821-
05).
S. M. Navidpour and M. Kavehrad are with the Department of Electrical
Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 USA
(e-mail: navidpour@psu.edu, mkavehrad@psu.edu).
M. Uysal is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineer-
ing, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1 (e-mail:
muysal@ece.uwaterloo.ca).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TWC.2007.06109.
FSO links are built taking into account a certain dynamic
margin, the practical limitations on link budgets do not allow
very high margins leaving the link vulnerable to deep fades.
Powerful fading-mitigation techniques need to be deployed
for FSO links particularly with transmission range of 1 km or
longer. Error control coding in conjunction with interleaving
can be employed in FSO communications to combat fading
[9], [10]. However, optical links with their transmission rates
of order of gigabits exhibit high temporal correlation. For
most scenarios, this requires large-size interleavers to achieve
the promised coding gains. Based on the statistical properties
of turbulence-induced fading, maximum likelihood sequence
detection (MLSD) is proposed in [11] as another solution
for fading mitigation. However, MLSD requires comp licated
multidimensional integr ations and suffers from excessive com -
putational complexity. Some sub-optimal temporal-domain
fading mitigation techniques are further explored in [11 ], [12].
Spatial diversity techniques
1
[13], i.e., the employment
of multiple transmit/receive apertures, provide an attractive
alternative approach for fading compensation with their inher-
ent redundancy. Besides its role as a fading-mitigation tool,
multiple-aperture designs significantly reduce the potential for
temporary blockage of the laser beam by obstructions (e.g.,
birds). Further justification for the employment of multiple
apertures comes from limitations in transmit power d ensity
(expressed in ter ms of m illiwatts per square centimeter). The
allowable safe laser power depends on the wavelength and ob-
viously a higher power at the receiver side allows the system to
support longer distances and through heavier attenuation while
achieving higher data rates. Information theoretic bounds for
MIMO FSO links have been first studied in [14], where
ergodic capacity and outage capacity are derived for intensity-
modulation/direct-detection (IM/DD) FSO links operating in
log-normal modeled atmospheric turbulence. Under the as-
sumption of shot-noise-limited regime with Poisson statistics,
it is demonstrated that ergodic capacity scales as the number
of transmit apertures times the number of receive apertures
for high signal-to-background noise ratio. Outage probability
for MIMO FSO links are d erived in [15] assuming Gaussian
noise statistics that can be considered as a limiting case of
Poisson statistics. We should also note an earlier experimental
study in [16] where Kim et.al. measure the performance of
a MIMO FSO link and discuss practical design issues such
as transm itter spacing an d spacing patterns, e.g., circular vs.
rectangular.
1
This paper does not consider space-time coding or multiplexing tech-
niques. In the following, MIMO (multi-input multi-output) term is sometimes
used to refer to the deployment of multiple-transmit and multiple-recei ve
apertures.
1536-1276/07$25.00
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2007 IEEE