<span>Optical wireless communication (OWC) has attracted significant interest recently in academia and industry. Free-space optical (FSO) communication systems are where free space acts as a communication channel between transceivers that are line of sight (LOS) for the successful transmission of optical signals. The FSO transmissions through the atmosphere, nevertheless, bring significant challenges, besides the uncertainty of atmospheric channels, especially the signal fading due to the atmospheric turbulence, attenuation and pointing errors caused by the random beam misalignments between transceivers, signal obstruction due to buildings or trees can pre-vent the transmitted message to reach the destination. This study theoretically investigates the average symbol error rate (ASER) of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) assisted FSO link over log-normal turbulence channels. The RIS effect is examined by considering the influence of link distance, transmitted optical power, and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) scheme on the ASER.</span>
<span lang="EN-US">Free-space optical (FSO) communication can provide the cost-efficient, secure, high data-rate communication links required for applications. For example, it provides broadband internet access and backhauling for the fifth-generation (5G) and the sixth-generation (6G) communication networks. However, previous solutions to deal with signal loss caused by obstructions and atmospheric turbulence. In these solutions, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are considered hardware technology to improve the performance of optical wireless communication systems. This study investigates the pointing error effects for RIS-aided FSO links under atmospheric turbulence channels. We analyze the performance of RIS-aided FSO links influenced by pointing errors, atmospheric attenuation, and turbulence for the subcarrier quadrature amplitude modulation (SC-QAM) technique. Atmospheric turbulence is modeled using log-normal distribution for weak atmospheric turbulence. Several numerical outcomes obtained for different transmitter beam waist radius and pointing error displacement standard deviation are shown to quantitatively illustrate the average symbol error rate (ASER).</span>
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