SER performance investigation of a MPPM relay-aided FSO system with three decision thresholds over EW fading channel considering pointing errors

Abstract The symbol error rate (SER) performance of a multi-hop parallel free-space optical (FSO) communication system with multiple pulse position modulation (MPPM) scheme considering three different decision threshold schemes, fixed decision threshold (FDT), optimized decision threshold (ODT), and dynamic decision threshold (DDT) has been investigated over exponentiated Weibull (EW) atmospheric turbulence channel combiningthe impact of the fading induced by pointing errors. On the basis of the decode-and-forward (DF) protocol, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and probability density function (PDF) in terms of the Meijer’ s G-function for this considered FSO communication system are derived with the max–min criterion as the best path selection scheme. After that, the closed-form SER expressions for three threshold schemes are obtained by Gauss–Laguerre quadrature function and then confirmed by Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. The SER performance is further analyzed systematically under different turbulence conditions, receiver aperture sizes, jitter variances, and structure parameters ( R and C ) for three decision threshold schemes. The results show that pointing errors will deteriorate the system performance, while the multi-hop parallel transmission can improve the SER performance and expand the communication range. Furthermore, ODT and DDT schemes can significantly overcome the effect of the error floor of FDT scheme. This work benefits the development of the MPPM based relay-aided FSO system.