Implementing adaptive networks with the free space optical (FSO) communication technology is a very interesting field of research because by adding the benefits of this technology, the adaptive networks become more efficient, cheap and secure. This is due to the fact that FSO communication uses unregistered visible light bandwidth instead of the overused radio spectrum. However, in spite of all the benefits of FSO communication, this technology suffers from optical noise and turbulence. In this paper, we investigate the exact effect of the negative exponential and k-distribution modeled strong turbulence conditions on the performance of diffusion adaptive networks. The simulation results show the deteriorating effects of these link models on diffusion networks.

This paper presents an investigation into the theoretical performance of diffusion adaptive networks within a distributed beam coordination application in a cell‐free communication network that utilizes coarsely quantized data. This analysis assumed data pulses with 1, 2, and 3 bits, and based on this assumption, simulations and theoretical analyses of distributed beamforming are conducted. The consistency between the simulation results and theoretical findings validated the accuracy of the calculations. Additionally, the distributed quantization aware least mean square (DQA‐LMS) algorithm was introduced for distributed beam coordination, demonstrating its superior performance in scenarios involving coarsely quantized data. Convergence conditions were provided and the results through various simulations were presented, including the array network mean square deviation (MSD), mean square error (MSE), and beamforming diagrams.