Performance analysis of FSO coherent BPSK systems over Rician turbulence channel with pointing errors

We investigate the performance of coherent free-space optical (FSO) system in terms of bit error rate (BER) evaluation by adopting the modified Rician distribution based coherent channel model which allows taking into consideration the composite effects of both Rician turbulence, including amplitude fluctuation and optical phase distortion, and pointing errors (PEs). By expanding the Rician distribution, a mathematically traceable expression of the probability density function (PDF) for the composite channel is derived in the form of the Meijer-G function. Based on the composite channel PDF, the exact BER expression is obtained, allowing the analysis of BER performance for single-input single-output (SISO) links. This analysis is extended to single-input multi-output (SIMO) links with maximal ratio combining (MRC). With the help of the moment generating function (MGF), the exact BER expression can be simplified into a single integral, facilitating the analysis with high accuracy and reducing calculation complexity. Engineering insights including high-SNR approximated channel PDF, asymptotic BER expression, coding and diversity gains, are investigated and cross-validated for both SISO and SIMO links. Through both analytical and numerical verifications, the impairment due to PEs as well as the effect of modal compensation on the BER performance are discussed in detail, unveiling the fact that their inner relations should be taken into account for optimization. These verify the effectiveness of our models for both SISO and SIMO links with a wide range of different conditions and can be feasibly applied for different types of coherent FSO links.