On the performance of optical wireless communication links impaired by time jitter, M-turbulence and pointing errors

The interest for the optical wireless communication systems increases significantly the last years due to the very high advantages of this technology. More specifically, the FSO links can achieve very high data rate and secure communications with low installation and operational cost. However, the main disadvantage of the FSO links is that their performance is dominated by the weather conditions and the turbulence of the atmosphere, where the optical beam propagates. The atmospheric turbulence mitigates significantly the performance of the FSO links and causes the scintillation effect, which results in rapid irradiance fluctuations at the receivers. Furthermore, another factor which increases the influence of the atmospheric turbulence and causes further fast changes at the receivers’ irradianceis the pointing errors. Additionally, the performance of most of the high data rate communication systems, is reduced by the time jitter effect, which causes the detection of each digital pulse before or later than the ideal time spot. Thus, in this work, the performance of a terrestrial FSO link is investigated, for first time under the simultaneous action of the M(alaga) atmospheric turbulence, the pointing errors and the time jitter effects for various, commonly used in FSO links, modulation schemes. Taking into account their joint influence, new accurate closed form mathematical expressions are derived for the average BER estimation. Finally, the corresponding numerical results and conclusions are shown and derived.