Impact of pointing errors and turbulence effects on POLSK and coherent OWC-based FSO system over generalized turbulence channel model

The emerging technology in wireless communication, free space optics (FSO) offers a myriad of merits over current radio frequency links due to its wide license-free bandwidth, ease of installation, high security features and viable cost for short-distance communication. Its unparallel high-speed data rate and immunity against electromagnetic interference makes FSO the emerging technology of today. Atmospheric conditions like absorption, scattering, turbulence and pointing error prevail during wireless transmission. Through this paper we aim at elucidating the effect of the error introduced by misalignment between the transmitter and receiver that are ideally required to be in the line of sight rendering pointing error. Pointing error and turbulence effects are the main limitation parameters for our analysis. For this purpose, we have taken into consideration three different modulation techniques polarization shift keying, coherent OWC and on–off keying FSO communication system. We derived the novel expressions for the average spectral efficiency (ASE) over the generalized turbulence model for these modulation techniques. The ASE is analyzed against average transmitted optical power with the maximum ASE of 50 bits/s/Hz at the transmitted power of 10 dBm for coherent OWC technique.