  The performance analysis of free space optical communication (FSO) system
using relays and spatial diversity at the source is studied in this paper. The
effect of atmospheric turbulence and attenuation, caused by different weather
conditions and geometric losses, has also been considered for analysis. The
exact closed-form expressions are presented for bit error rate (BER) of M-ary
quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) technique for multi-hop multiple-input
single-output (MISO) FSO system under log-normal fading channel. Furthermore,
the link performance of multi-hop MISO and multi-hop single-input and
single-output (SISO) FSO systems are compared to the different systems using
on-off keying (OOK), repetition codes (RCs) and M-ary pulse amplitude
modulation (M-PAM) techniques. A significant performance enhancement in terms
of BER analysis and SNR gains is shown for multi-hop MISO and multi-hop SISO
FSO systems with M-QAM over other existing systems with different modulation
schemes. Moreover, Monte-Carlo simulations are used to validate the accuracy
and consistency of the derived analytical results. Numerical results show that
M-QAM modulated multi-hop MISO and multi-hop SISO FSO system with relays and
spatial diversity outperforms other systems while having the same spectral
efficiency of each system.
