Optical Communication Using Subcarrier Intensity Modulation in Strong Atmospheric Turbulence

Error rate performance of subcarrier intensity modulations is analyzed for optical wireless communications over strong atmospheric turbulence channels. We study the error rate of a subcarrier intensity modulated optical wireless communication system employing M -ary phase-shift keying, differential phase-shift keying, and noncoherent frequency-shift keying. Both K -distributed turbulence channel (strong) and negative exponential turbulence channel (saturated) are considered. Closed-form error rate expressions are derived using a series expansion of the modified Bessel function. Furthermore, the outage probability expressions are obtained for subcarrier intensity modulated optical wireless communication systems over the K-distributed turbulence and the negative exponential channels. Asymptotic error rate analysis and truncation error analysis are also presented. Our asymptotic analysis shows that differential phase-shift keying suffers a constant signal-to-noise ratio performance loss of 3.92 dB with respect to binary phase-shift keying under strong atmospheric turbulence conditions. The numerical results demonstrate that our series solutions are efficient and highly accurate.