General closed-form bit-error rate expressions for coded M-distributed atmospheric optical communications.

In this Letter, general closed-form expressions for the average bit error rate in atmospheric optical links employing rate-adaptive channel coding are derived. To characterize the irradiance fluctuations caused by atmospheric turbulence, the Málaga or M distribution is employed. The proposed expressions allow us to evaluate the performance of atmospheric optical links employing channel coding schemes such as OOK-GSc, OOK-GScc, HHH(1,13), or vw-MPPM with different coding rates and under all regimes of turbulence strength. A hyper-exponential fitting technique applied to the conditional bit error rate is used in all cases. The proposed closed-form expressions are validated by Monte-Carlo simulations.