Comparative performance study of one or multiple receivers schemes for FSO links over gamma–gamma turbulence channels

Terrestrial free space optical telecommunication systems offer license-free very high bandwidth access characteristics with significantly low installation and operational cost. On the other hand, the performance of such a system depends strongly on the weather conditions in the area between the transmitter and the receiver due to the fact that the transmission media is the atmosphere. A very significant phenomenon which decreases a FSO links' performance is atmospheric turbulence. In order to counterbalance this reduction, in this work, we consider a free space optical system with a multiple receivers' scheme and diversity in space that operates under weak to strong atmospheric turbulence conditions modeled by the gamma–gamma distribution. We derive closed form mathematical expressions for the estimation of the outage probability and the average bit error rate of the multiple receivers' system. Additionally, we compare the performance capabilities of the single point to point link with those of the spatial diversity scheme under the assumption that the total aperture surface of the receivers of the latter is the same as the aperture surface of the single receiver of the former. Moreover, we demonstrate numerical results for a variety of common practical cases for both cases, with and without, spatial diversity.