Error rate performance of wireless optical heterodyne communication systems over generalized atmospheric turbulence channels

Very recently, a generic propagation model and, from it, a new and unifying statistical model has been obtained for the irradiance fluctuations. The presented statistical model, termed M-distribution, can be written in a closed-form expression and it contains most of the statistical models for the irradiance fluctuations that have been proposed in the bibliography. Relying on this generic model, in this paper, the performance of wireless optical heterodyne communication system is investigated and closed-form analytical expression is derived for the average bit error rate (BER) of the system. Since the turbulence-induced fading is modeled by a generic distribution, the derived expressions can be applied for performance analysis of the wireless optical heterodyne communication systems over most of the proposed statistical models derived until now.