Subcarrier MPSK/MDPSK modulated optical wireless communications in lognormal turbulence

Bit-error rate (BER) performance of subcarrier M-ary phase-shift keying (MPSK) and M-ary differential phase-shift keying (MDPSK) is analyzed for optical wireless communications over the lognormal turbulence channels. Both exact BER and approximate BER expressions are presented. We demonstrate that the approximate BER, which is obtained by dividing the symbol error rate by the number of bits per symbol, can be used to estimate the BER performance with acceptable accuracy. Through our asymptotic analysis, we derive closed-form asymptotic BER performance loss expression for MDPSK with respect to MPSK in the lognormal turbulence channels.