Abstract:
Signal transmission over underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) experiences the combined effect of oceanic turbulence and pointing errors statistically modeled using the sum of two Meijer-G functions. There is a research gap in the exact statistical analysis of multi-aperture UOWC systems that use selection combining diversity techniques to enhance performance compared to single-aperture systems. In this paper, we develop a general framework for the continued product and positive integer exponent for the sum of Meijer-G functions to analyze the exact statistical performance of the UOWC system in terms of multivariate Fox-H function for both independent and non-identically distributed (i.ni.d.) and independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channels. We also approximate the performance of a multi-aperture UOWC system with i.i.d. channels using the single-variate Fox-H function. Using the generalized approach, we present analytical expressions for average bit-error rate (BER) and ergodic capacity for the considered system operating over exponential–generalized gamma (EGG) oceanic turbulence combined with zero-boresight pointing errors. We also develop asymptotic expressions for the average BER at a high signal-to-noise (SNR) to capture insights into the system's performance. Our simulation findings confirm the accuracy of our derived expressions and illustrate the impact of turbulence parameters for i.ni.d. and i.i.d. models for the average BER and ergodic capacity, which may provide a better estimate for the efficient deployment of UOWC.