Average Channel Capacity of Amplify-and-forward MIMO/FSO Systems Over Atmospheric Turbulence Channels

In amplify-and-forward (AF) relay channel, when the direct link between source and destination terminals is deeply faded, the signal from the source terminal to the destination terminal propagates through the relay terminals, each of which relays a signal received from the previous terminal to the next terminal in series. This paper, we theoretically analyze the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) AF free-space optical (FSO) systems. The AF-MIMO/FSO average channel capacity (ACC), which is expressed in terms of average spectral efficiency (ASE) is derived taking into account the atmospheric turbulence effects on the MIMO/FSO channel. They are modeled by log-normal and the gamma-gamma distributions for the cases of weak-to-strong turbulence conditions. We extract closed form mathematical expression for the evaluation of the ACC and we quantitatively discuss the influence of turbulence strength, link distance, different number of relay stations and different MIMO configurations on it.