Irradiance Distribution and Performance Analysis of Vector Vortex Beams in Atmospheric Turbulence

Free space optical communication (FSOC) offers secure and high data transmission. However, atmospheric turbulence poses a significant bottleneck for FSOC. These limitations can be effectively addressed with vector vortex beams (VVBs), which leverage phase and polarization singularities, exhibiting resilience to turbulence. Despite this potential, existing studies have not explored the irradiance (intensity) distribution of the VVB in the turbulent channel. This paper derives the irradiance distribution for C-point and V-point beams, which are prominent VVBs known in the literature for their increased resilience to turbulence. Additionally, an in-depth analysis of the bit error rate (BER) performance of VVBs using on-off keying (OOK) modulation has been conducted. We tested the model using a scalar Gaussian beam to validate the obtained results and compared it with the results available in the literature.