Abstract
Free-space optical (FSO) communication suffers from several challenges in
practical deployment; the major of them is fading or scintillation. To
overcome such limitations, spatial diversity based on MIMO techniques has
been proposed for FSO systems. User Cooperation diversity is a new form of
spatial diversity which is introduced to overcome some limitations of MIMO
structures. Although the promising effects of cooperative transmission in RF
communications have greatly been considered so far, there have been a few
notable research on cooperative diversity in FSO. In this paper, we first
consider a 3-way FSO communication setup, in which the cooperative protocol
can be applied to achieve the spatial diversity without much increase in
hardware, compared to their regular transmission. Then, we introduce
different cooperative strategies and investigate their bit error rate (BER)
performance in the presence of shot noise, using the photon-count method. We
compare the results with those of the direct path link (non-cooperative
scheme) and the two transmitters case, which are the upper and lower bounds
on the BER of the cooperative scheme, respectively. The results illustrate
the advantages of cooperation under a number of different scenarios for
realistic SNRs.
© 2009 IEEE
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