Effects of adaptive optics on bit error rate of M-ary PPM oceanic optical wireless communication systems with aperture averaging in strong turbulence

Abstract

Scintillation is the result of oceanic turbulence reducing the bit error rate (BER) performance of oceanic optical wireless communication (OWC) systems. The scintillation, also known as intensity fluctuations, occurs due to the turbulence-induced wavefront deformations. The correction of deformations by adaptive optics (AO) reduces the scintillation effect of turbulence and results in improved BER performance. In this paper, an oceanic OWC (OOWC) system that has a Gaussian laser beam at the transmitter, finite-sized circular aperture at the receiver, employing M-ary pulse position modulation (PPM) and operating in strong oceanic turbulence, is considered. Improvement in the BER performance of the OOWC system is examined with the implementation of AO correction. Comparison of BER performances between the AO and non-adaptive optics OOWC systems is shown by calculating the metric defined. BER of M-ary PPM OOWC links is evaluated over gamma-gamma fading channels. The modified Rytov theory together with the Zernike filter functions is used to find the AO corrected aperture averaged scintillation index where extended Huygens-Fresnel technique is used to obtain the average received signal power.