A Unifying Statistical Model for Atmospheric Optical Scintillation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive statistical model for optical wavefront irradiance fluctuations in turbulent media, unifying previous models and providing closed-form expressions that match experimental data across all turbulence conditions.

Contribution

It presents a new unifying statistical model for optical scintillation that is mathematically tractable and applicable under all turbulence regimes, improving upon existing models.

Findings

Provides closed-form expressions for channel statistics.

Unifies multiple existing models into a single framework.

Shows excellent agreement with experimental data.

Abstract

In this paper we develop a new statistical model for the irradiance fluctuations of an unbounded optical wavefront (plane and spherical waves) propagating through a turbulent medium under all irradiance fluctuation conditions in homogeneous, isotropic turbulence. The major advantage of the model is that leads to closed-form and mathematically-tractable expressions for the fundamental channel statistics of an unbounded optical wavefront under all turbulent regimes. Furthermore, it unifies most of the proposed statistical models for the irradiance fluctuations derived in the bibliography providing, in addition, an excellent agreement with the experimental data.