Performance analysis of MIMO FSO link with Alamouti coding and switch-and-examine combining

Atmospheric turbulence is one of the main causes of degrading the quality of service in free-space optical (FSO) systems. The use of diversity techniques in an FSO system can minimize the fading effect which is caused by atmospheric turbulence. When diversity combining is applied at both the transmitter and the receiver ends, the system can mitigate the degradation more effectively. In this paper, we consider a \(2\times L\) multiple-input multiple-output FSO system with on–off keying modulation where the link is affected by gamma–gamma fading. Alamouti space–time coding is implemented at the transmitter, while the receiver employs switch-and-examine combining. Analytical expressions for different performance metrics such as outage probability, average bit error rate and average capacity are derived using a moment-generating function-based approach. Numerical results are provided and are compared with Monte Carlo simulations.