Performance of receive diversity FSO systems under realistic beam propagation conditions

The performance of multiple-aperture freespace optical communication systems is studied under the conditions of correlated fading, considering the Gamma-Gamma (ΓΓ) model for the intensity fluctuations. Waveoptics numerical simulations based on the random phase screen method are used to simulate beam propagation through the turbulent atmosphere and to calculate the fading correlation coefficient between each pair of sub-channels. Then, in order to evaluate the system performance via Monte-Carlo simulations, we propose a method to generate correlated ΓΓ random variables. Lastly, we present some numerical results to show the impact of fading correlation on the performance of multiple-aperture systems.