Adaptive detection technique for optical wireless communication over strong turbulence channels

Optical wireless communication (OWC) systems use the atmosphere as a propagation medium, so the atmospheric turbulence effects lead to fading related with signal intensity. The received signal of OWC over strong turbulence channels is assumed to be a mixture of K-distributed fading and Gaussian distributed thermal noise. Second-order spectral analysis is unable to separately estimate the mixed signal. In order to mitigate the fading induced by turbulence, the decision threshold-updating algorithm based on second and higher order cumulants is proposed and is able to operate in an unknown turbulence environment. The performance of the adaptive processing scheme has been evaluated by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Simulation results show the improvement of the bit error rate (BER) performance.