Outage capacity and outage rate performance of MIMO free-space optical system over strong turbulence channel

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate outage capacity, outage probability, and outage rate performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) free-space optical system operating over strong turbulence channels. The MIMO optical system employs intensity modulation direct detection with on-off signaling, and equal gain combining technique at the receiver. We derived novel closed-form expressions for three system metrics, namely, outage capacity, outage probability, and outage rate. Expressions derived here are based on the generalized Gamma–Gamma channel model, which is based on scintillation theory that assumes that the irradiance of the received optical wave is modeled as the product of small-scale and large-scale turbulence eddies. The results are evaluated for different values of received signal-to-noise ratios, strong turbulence conditions, and several values of transmit/receive diversity.