Abstract
In this paper, we investigate both the bit error rate (BER) and outage performance of free-space optical (FSO) links over strong turbulence combined with various pointing error conditions. Considering atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors as main factors that deteriorate the quality of an optical link, we obtain a unified finite series approximation of the composite probability density function, which embraces generalized pointing error models. This approximation leads to new unified formulas for the BER and outage capacity of an FSO link, which account for the two possible detection mechanisms of intensity modulation/direct detection and heterodyne detection. Selected simulation results confirm that the newly derived approximations can give precise predictions of both the average BER and the outage capacity of FSO communication that are generally applicable to all environments.