Performance analysis of satellite-to-ground downlink optical communications with spatial diversity over Gamma-Gamma atmospheric turbulence

The performances of satellite-to-ground downlink optical communications over Gamma-Gamma distributed turbulence are studied for a multiple-aperture receiver system. Equal gain-combining (EGC) and selection-combining (SC) techniques are considered as practical schemes to mitigate the atmospheric turbulence under thermal-noise-limited conditions. Bit-error rate (BER) performances for on-off keying-modulated direct detection and outage probabilities are analyzed and compared for SC diversity receptions using analytical results and for EGC diversity receptions through an approximation method. To show the net diversity gain of a multiple-aperture receiver system, BER performances and outage probabilities of EGC and SC receiver systems are compared with a single monolithic-aperture receiver system with the same total aperture area (same average total incident optical power) for satellite-to-ground downlink optical communications. All the numerical results are also verified by Monte-Carlo simulations. (C) 2015 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)