Design and evaluation of an IDM-based MIMO FSO system over Gamma-Gamma turbulence channels

In this paper, we design an interleave-division-multiplexing (IDM) based multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) free-space optics (FSO) communication system. The system overcomes problems harassing conventional optical MIMO systems such as restrictions of antenna number and high complexity in receiver. An iterative on-off keying (OOK) modulated IDM MIMO detection algorithm is developed. Expression of an upper bound of frame-error-rate (FER) is derived. In addition, we evaluate the BER performance of the proposed optical MIMO scheme in various FSO scenarios. Simulations confirm that the proposed scheme can effectively increase the feasibility of FSO communications over Gamma-Gamma turbulence-induced fading channels.