Open AccessImpact of pointing errors on the performance of generalized atmospheric optical channels
Author(s) -
Antonio Jurado-Navas,
José María Garrido-Balsells,
José F. Paris,
Miguel Castillo-Vázquez,
Antonio Puerta-Notario
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.20.012550
Subject(s) - optics , scintillation , wavefront , physics , irradiance , isotropy , turbulence , plane wave , huygens–fresnel principle , plane (geometry) , computational physics , statistical physics , mathematics , mechanics , geometry , detector
Recently, a new and generalized statistical model, called M or Málaga distribution, was proposed to model the irradiance fluctuations of an unbounded optical wavefront (plane and spherical waves) propagating through a turbulent medium under all irradiance fluctuation conditions in homogeneous, isotropic turbulence. Málaga distribution was demonstrated to have the advantage of unifying most of the proposed statistical models derived until now in the bibliography in a closed-form expression providing, in addition, an excellent agreement with published plane wave and spherical wave simulation data over a wide range of turbulence conditions (weak to strong). Now, such a model is completed by including the adverse effect of pointing error losses due to misalignment. In this respect, the well-known effects of aperture size, beam width and jitter variance are taken into account. Accordingly, after presenting the analytical expressions for the combined distribution of scintillation and pointing errors, we derive its centered moments of the overall probability distribution. Finally, we obtain the analytical expressions for the average bit error rate performance for the M distribution affected by pointing errors. Numerical results show the impact of misalignment on link performance.