AbstractWeather conditions are severely degraded the performance of FSO communication link. Atmospheric turbulence is one of the important weather conditions that degrade the performance even under clear sky condition. In this paper, we provide a noble analytical approach to evaluate the performance of STBC coded FDM FSO communication system with direct detection optical receiver under turbulent condition. Analysis is carried out to find the channel capacity of RF subcarrier modulation taking into consideration the effect of strong atmospheric turbulence which is modeled as gamma-gamma distribution and the probability density function of the conditional CNR, conditioned on a given turbulence-induced fading is derived considering equal gain receive diversity combining technique with direct detection optical receiver followed by RF synchronous demodulation. Results are evaluated numerically in terms of average CNR, BER and channel capacity for several system parameters like turbulence variance, link distance, data rate, etc.
