IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO.

13, JULY 1, 2011

839

A Simple, Accurate Approximation to the Sum of

GammaGamma Variates and Applications in MIMO
Free-Space Optical Systems
Kostas P. Peppas, Member, IEEE

AbstractIn this letter, we propose a simple accurate

closed-form approximation to the probability density function (pdf) of the sum of independent, identically distributed
gammagamma (G-G) random variables. It is shown that the pdf
of the G-G sum can be efficiently approximated by the pdf of an
distribution. Based on this approach, simple precise approximations for important performance metrics of multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) free-space optical systems operating
over G-G fading are presented. The accuracy of the proposed
method is substantiated by various numerically evaluated and
computer simulation results.
Index TermsFree-space optics (FSO), gammagamma (G-G)
distribution, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems,
distribution.

I. INTRODUCTION

REE-SPACE optics (FSO), has recently received considerable attention and commercial interest as an attractive
solution for high-capacity and cost-effective terrestrial communications [1]. However, the performance of FSO communication systems is highly susceptible to adverse atmospheric conditions (e.g. fog), pointing errors and atmospheric turbulence.
Several distributions have been proposed for modeling atmospheric turbulence. Among them, the so-called gammagamma
(G-G) distribution has become the dominant fading model for
FSO links because of its excellent agreement with measurement
data for a wide range of turbulence conditions [2].
The impact of turbulence in FSO systems can be significantly
reduced by using multiple lasers at the transmitter and multiple
photo-detectors at the receiver [2][4]. The performance of such
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems has been addressed in several past works. For example, in [3] the authors investigated the BER performance of FSO links over log-normal
atmospheric turbulence channels with spatial diversity. In [4],
using a single G-G approximation for the distribution of the
sum of independent G-G variates, the performance of MIMO
FSO systems, operating over strong turbulence channels and
employing Equal Gain Combining (EGC) at the receiver was investigated. In [2] infinite series representations for the error per-

Manuscript received December 14, 2010; revised March 03, 2011; accepted
March 16, 2011. Date of publication April 05, 2011; date of current version June
02, 2011.
The author is with the Laboratory of Mobile Communications, Institute
of Informatics and Telecommunications, National Centre for Scientific Research-Demokritos, Patriarhou Grigoriou and Neapoleos, Agia Paraskevi,
15310 Athens, Greece (e-mail: kpeppas@iit.demokritos.gr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2011.2135342

formance of MIMO FSO systems and operating over independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) gammagamma fading
channels were proposed.
In this letter, the
distribution [5] is used in order to
approximate the sum of arbitrary i.i.d. G-G variates. Based on
this result, simple accurate approximations for the outage probability (OP) and average bit error probability (ABEP) of MIMO
FSO systems operating over i.i.d. G-G channels and employing
EGC at the receiver are provided. Various numerically evaluated and computer simulation results demonstrate the accuracy
of the proposed analysis.
II.
Let
pdf of

APPROXIMATION TO THE SUM OF G-G VARIATES

be a sum of
i.i.d. G-G variates. The
can be expressed as [2, eq. (3)]

(1)
where
with
denoting expectation,
is the
Gamma function [6, eq. (8.310/1)] and
is the modified
Bessel function of the second kind and order [6, eq. (8.407/1)].
The parameters and can be selected to achieve a good agreement between
and measurement data [2]. Alternatively,
assuming spherical wave propagation, parameters and are
directly related to atmospheric conditions using respectively [1,
eq. (60)] and [1, eq. (61)] as
(2)
and

(3)
In (2) and (3),
is the Rytov variance [1, eq. (32)] defined as
[1, p. 363]
and
,
where is the distance between transmitter and receiver,
is the optical wave number with being the operational
wavelength, is the aperture diameter of the receiver, and
is
the strength of the atmospheric turbulence. The th moment of
defined as
can be obtained using
[6, eq. (6.561/16)] as

1041-1135/$26.00 2011 IEEE

(4)

840

IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2011

In this contribution, we propose to approximate the pdf

and cumulative distribution function (cdf)
of by the
pdf and cdf given in [5]
(5)
(6)
are the distribution parameters,
In (5), (6),
is a scale parameter and
is the incomplete gamma function [6, eq. (8.350/2)]. The motivation behind this approximation is twofold: First, in a recently published work [7] it was
shown that the gamma distribution can be used to approximate
the sum of independent G-G variates. We feel that the use of
a more generic distribution, which includes as special case the
gamma distribution (in the
case by setting
), will
result in a more accurate approximation. Second, as it will become evident, the estimation of the parameters of the resulting
pdf requires the knowledge of the first, the second and
the fourth moment of , which can be easily evaluated given
the moments of
. Therefore, the resulting pdf incorporates
information regarding the mean, the variance and the kurtosis
of . In order to render (5) and (6) an accurate approximation,
moment-based estimators for , and are used. These estimators are obtained as [5]
(7)
(8)
(9)
The required moments
,
and
uated using (4) and the multinomial identity as

Fig. 1. Exact and approximate cdf of the sum of

variates.

where is positive integer. Using Maple, the command lines

given in (11),

i.i.d G-G

sum of two and nine i.i.d. G-G variates with

for different
values of parameters and . As it can be observed, in all considered test cases, the proposed approximation is highly accurate and practically indistinguishable from the exact cdf curves.
A comparison of the proposed method with the one proposed
in [7] reveals that our method performs equally well for both
small and large values of . Thus, a correcting factor, similar
to the one introduced in [7] to obtain a sufficient approximation
accuracy, is no longer required. Moreover, in [4, eq. (38)], an approximate expression for the cdf of in terms of Meijer-G functions [6, eq. (9.301)] is provided. However, since the evaluation
of Meijer-G functions can be sometimes laborious, (6) may be
preferable to [4, eq. (38)] in terms of computational complexity.
Finally, our derived formulas are simpler than those presented
in [2], since the latter are expressed as infinite series and require
the computation of convolutional sums.
III. APPLICATION IN MIMO FSO SYSTEMS

can be eval-

(10)

and

We consider a MIMO FSO system where the information

signal is transmitted via
apertures and received by
apertures. The information bits are modulated using On-Off keying
(OOK) and transmitted through the apertures using repetition
coding [2]. A high-energy FSO system whose performance is
limited by background radiation and thermal noise is assumed.
Under this assumption, the use of the AWGN model as a good
approximation of the Poisson photon counting detection model
is applicable [3]. The received signal at the th receive aperture
is expressed as
(12)
is the optical-to-electrical conversion coefficient,
represents the information bits and is the AWGN with
zero mean and variance
. Furthermore, we assume
that the
-s are independent random variables, a fact justified
for link distances of the order of kilometers and for aperture
separation distances of the order of centimeters [2]. The output
of the receiver, assuming that EGC combining is employed, can
be expressed as
where

(11)
can be utilized to obtain and in a computationally efficient
,
, 2, 4. The parameter
manner. In this case,
can be finally obtained using (9). To demonstrate the accuracy of
this analysis, Fig. 1 shows the exact and approximate cdfs of the

(13)

PEPPAS: SIMPLE, ACCURATE APPROXIMATION TO THE SUM OF GAMMAGAMMA VARIATES

Fig. 2. Outage probability of MIMO FSO systems employing EGC and oper,(
ating over i.i.d gammagamma fading channels as a function of
nm,
m
and
).

where
tween the

. The received electrical SNR betransmit and receive aperture, is defined as [8]
and the corresponding average electrical
SNR as
. The electrical SNR of
the combined signal at the output of the receiver is given by
(14)
Next, assuming that
follow a G-G distribution with
normalized to unity, important performance evaluation metrics for the considered MIMO system will be obtained.
A. Outage Probability
The OP is defined as the probability that the instantaneous
SNR of the combined signal at the receiver output, falls below
a predefined threshold
, namely
. Using
(14) and (6), a simple, accurate closed form approximation for
the OP is obtained as
(15)
In Fig. 2 the OP of the considered system is plotted as a function
for
km
of the inverse normalized outage threshold
and
km. The parameters and are obtained using (2)
and (3) assuming
nm,
m
and
. Both numerically evaluated and computer simulation results are depicted. From the above mentioned plot, it is
clear that the derived approximative expressions are highly accurate for every considered MIMO deployment and for all considered link distances.
B. Average Bit Error Probability
Assuming perfect Channel State Information (CSI), the
ABEP of the considered FSO system is given by [3]
(16)

841

Fig. 3. ABEP of MIMO FSO systems employing EGC and operating over i.i.d
nm,
gammagamma fading channels as a function of , (
m
and
).

where
is the complementary error function [6, eq.
(8.250/1)]. To evaluate ABEP, the pdf of ,
, at the
combiner output, will be approximated by the pdf of a single
channel given in (5) where the parameters and are estimated
as functions of and . Having obtained these parameters,
the ABEP is easily obtained by substituting (5) into (16) and
performing symbolic or numerical integration. In Fig. 3 the
ABEP of the considered MIMO system is depicted as a function
of the average electrical SNR, , using the same parameters
considered in the OP case. From the observation of Fig. 3, one
can verify similar findings to that mentioned in Fig. 2 regarding
the accuracy of the proposed approximation.

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