Performance of Opportunistic Receiver Beam Selection in Multiaperture OWC Systems Over Foggy Channels

The atmospheric foggy condition is a major bottleneck for the deployment of optical wireless communication (OWC) systems in outdoor environments. Although the attenuation coefficient in the foggy channel follows the simple Gamma distribution, the distribution of its channel state is quite complicated similar to the well-studied Gamma–Gamma turbulence channel. Furthermore, existing literature suggested schemes that require feedback of the channel state information (CSI) to improve the outage performance of the OWC system under foggy conditions. In this article, we study the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), ergodic rate, and energy consumption performance of OWC systems under foggy conditions. First, we show that a single-aperture OWC system suffers significantly from the fog attenuation by deriving analytical expressions on the ergodic rate and energy consumption. Then, we consider a multiaperture OWC system equipped with an opportunistic receiver beam selection (RBS) scheme. The RBS scheme is based on the simple selection combining diversity algorithm, which does not require the knowledge of CSI. We analyze the proposed scheme by deriving computable bounds on the average SNR, ergodic rate, and energy consumption using system parameters and show the performance improvement of the RBS scheme comparing the single-aperture system. We demonstrate the performance of the considered scheme and validate derived expressions using computer simulations.