Performance investigation of FSO communication systems with chromatic dispersion, propagation losses and truncated normal modeled time jitter

FSO systems are identified as very reliable, effective and low-cost, wireless technologies for optical communications. However, the information carriers which are the optical pulses are subject to several effects during their propagation path. The atmospheric channels are heavily affected by the current weather conditions, causing signal fluctuations and power losses. Additionally, the very significant physical effect of the group velocity dispersion is responsible for the pulse shape changes along the propagation, especially for very short pulses, i.e. very high data rate transmission and long propagation distances. Furthermore, the time jitter affects strongly the reliability of the links, causing in practice, large irradiance fluctuations that may lead to signal outages or misdetections. All the above mentioned phenomena are studied jointly in this work and, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, the overall link performance is estimated in terms of links’ probability of fade, outage probability and average bit error rate by means of closed form or very accurate approximate mathematical expressions which can be used in any FSO link is needed. The weak-to-moderate time jitter effect, which is assumed in this work, here, is modeled by the truncated normal distribution. The corresponding numerical results for typical and realistic FSO parameters are presented while the obtained outcomes can be easily used for the estimation and designing of any other FSO under consideration.