Performance analysis of FSO using relays and spatial diversity under log-normal fading channel

The performance analysis of free space optical communication (FSO) system using relays and spatial diversity at the source is studied in this paper. The effect of atmospheric turbulence and attenuation, caused by different weather conditions and geometric losses, has also been considered for analysis. The exact closed-form expressions are presented for bit error rate (BER) of M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) technique for multi-hop multiple-input single-output (MISO) FSO system under log-normal fading channel. Furthermore, the link performance of multi-hop MISO and multi-hop singleinput and single-output (SISO) FSO systems are compared to the different systems using on-off keying (OOK), repetition codes (RCs) and M-ary pulse amplitude modulation (M-PAM) techniques. A significant performance enhancement in terms of BER analysis and SNR gains is shown for multi-hop MISO and multi-hop SISO FSO systems with M-QAM over other existing systems with different modulation schemes. Moreover, Monte-Carlo simulations are used to validate the accuracy and consistency of the derived analytical results. Numerical results show that M-QAM modulated multi-hop MISO and multi-hop SISO FSO system with relays and spatial diversity outperforms other systems while having the same spectral efficiency of each system. Keywords—Free Space Optical Communications, Log-Normal Fading Channel, Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, Spatial Diversity, Bit Error Rate, Decode and Forward Relay