BER performance analysis of M-ary PPM over exponentiated Weibull distribution for airborne laser communications

In this paper, we use the characteristics of Meijer G function to get a closed form expression for BER of airborne optical communication systems under the combined influence of atmospheric turbulence and aero-optic effects. The atmospheric turbulence is modelled by the exponentiated Weibull (EW) distribution that can accurately describe the probability density function (PDF) of the irradiance under weak to strong condition in the presence of aperture averaging. Next, we use our derived form to study the effect of atmospheric conditions, operating wavelength and modulation level on the system performance. Moreover, the BER performance is analysed for different aperture sizes of the receiver as well. Results suggest that the aperture averaging technique can significantly improve the system performance in turbulence and aero-optics effects. Furthermore, this work is helpful for the compensate technique of system performance on airborne optical communication system.