Optical Communication in Turbulent Media*

A study is made of the error rate for binary single-path fading channels using photocount detection. First, noiseless channels are examined. The photocount-distribution change caused by fading is proved to be a linear transformation representable by a matrix containing both positive and negative terms. Second, the performance of noisy channels with log-normal fading is discussed by giving the error exponent as a function of noise photocounts, signal-to-noise ratio, and amount of turbulence.