Effect of Atmospheric Turbulence on Packet Detection in Optical Communications

The effect of atmospheric turbulence on packet detection is studied in the range of the scintillation index σ relevant to laser communications. The effect of scintillation is treated as a lognormal random process. Therefore, finding the probability of miss is equivalent to finding the cumulative distribution function of a sum of L independent lognormal random variables. Two techniques for finding this sum are compared with simulation, and probability of miss curves are presented for a correlation detector with preamble length L = 108 and σ ranging from 0.2 to 1.0.