Abstract
Free-space optical (FSO) communication has become a cost-effective method to provide high data rates. However, the turbulence-induced fading limits its application to short-range applications. To address this, we propose a multiuser diversity (MD) FSO scheme in which the Nth best user is selected and the channel fluctuations can be effectively exploited to produce a selection diversity gain. More specifically, we first present the statistics analysis for the considered system over both weak and strong atmospheric turbulence channels. Based on these statistics, the outage probability, bit-error rate performance, average capacity, diversity order, and coverage are analyzed. Results show that the diversity order for the gamma-gamma fading is N min{alpha,beta}/2, where N is the number of users, and alpha and beta are the channel fading parameters related to the effective atmospheric conditions of the link.