Performance analysis of optical wireless communications with aperture averaging over exponentiated Weibull turbulence with pointing errors

Aperture averaging (AA) is a potential technique to reduce the effect of atmospheric turbulence in optical wireless communications (OWC). Although there is significant research on point-like detectors, there is a gap in the study on the analytical performance evaluation of OWC systems with AA over atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors. In this paper, we analyze the performance of a single-link OWC system by considering the three-parameter exponentiated Weibull (EW) model for the atmospheric turbulence and the zero boresight fading model for pointing errors. We derive analytical expressions for moments of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), ergodic capacity, outage probability, average bit-error-rate (BER), and average energy consumption under the combined effect of atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors in terms of system parameters. To provide insights on the system behavior, we develop asymptotic bounds at high SNR on the performance of the considered system. We also derive analytical expressions for the performance of OWC system under the atmospheric turbulence with negligible pointing errors. We demonstrate the performance of OWC system over EW turbulence with a comparison to the performance obtained using the Gamma–Gamma (GG) model and demonstrate the tightness of the derived performance bounds through numerical and simulation analysis.