Impact of pointing errors on the SER performance of free space optical communication system with two decision thresholds over exponentiated Weibull fading channels

Abstract The impact of pointing errors on the symbol error rate (SER) performance of multiple pulse-position modulation (MPPM) free space optical (FSO) system with optimized decision threshold (ODT) and dynamic decision threshold (DDT) is investigated over exponentiated Weibull atmospheric turbulence channels. The probability density function (PDF) of the aggregated channel model is derived on the basis of Meijer’s G-function and the closed-form SER expression is then obtained by Gauss–Laguerre quadrature function. The variations of SER performance with different jitter variances, beam width, aperture sizes, and turbulence strengths for these two decision threshold schemes are analyzed in detail. The study shows that the impact of jitter variances is more apparent for ODT than that for DDT scheme and the performance difference between ODT and DDT schemes decreases with the increase of beam width. Monte Carlo simulation is also provided to verify the correctness of the proposed SER models. This work is beneficial to the design of FSO system.