Performance analysis of a free-space laser communication system with a Gaussian Schell model

In practice, due to reasons related to the characteristics of the laser device and the inevitable error of the processing technique, a laser beam emitted from a communication terminal is represented by the Gaussian–Schell model. The incident optical intensity at the receiver aperture is affected by the source coherence parameter through atmospheric turbulence. With full consideration of both the average optical intensity and the scintillation, the statistical distribution of the optical intensity and the average bit error rate (BER) of an on-off keying (OOK) receiver is obtained. The results indicate that the effect on the degradation of the average optical intensity is reduced with a smaller beamwidth. The performance of the OOK receiver degrades drastically with the increasing source coherence parameter. Moreover, when the beamwidth becomes larger, the BER₀ with a consistent source coherence parameter shifts to the side of lower BER. The goal of this work is to improve the redundancy design of the laser communication receiver system.