Block Error Performance of PAM or PPM SIMO FSO Links over Strong Turbulence Channels

The last decade optical wireless communication has attracted significant commercial and research interest mostly due to the many advantages for point-to-point connections. Nevertheless, the operation of these systems is strongly affected on weather conditions and especially by atmospheric turbulence. In order to counterbalance the negative effects of turbulence for a given propagation distance several techniques have been proposed in the literature. One of the most well-known and effective among them is the receivers’ diversity. Motivated by this, in this work, the influence of the modulation scheme in the total average block error rate of a single input multiple output (SIMO) free space optical (FSO) system over strong turbulent channels is estimated and new closed form analytical expressions are derived.