Assessment of Atmospheric Turbulence Effect on the Free Space Optical Communications links for Optimum Performance, over Western Cape, South Africa

Abstract

Lately, Free Space Optical (FSO) communication turned out to be one of the utmost newly created ways of wireless communication. FSO is a method employed to transmit infor mation carried by an optical maser ray all the way through the environment. Although, FSO proffers a wideband facility, it entails a Line of Sight (LOS) transmission amongst the carrier and receipient. The environment has special consequences on the optical maser ray going through it. The degree of information obtained is influenced through dispersion and also atmospheric disturbace. The atmospheric disturbance is instigated with equally transient and unique indiscriminate changes of the index of refraction through an emission of light line. Atmospheric instability worsens the performance of FSO owed to the instability in the strength of the optical maser ray. Based on the Bit Error Rate (BER) and Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), this study assesses the effect of atmospheric disturbance on FSO systems links over George in Western Cape of South Africa. The result shows that the SNR increases with optical wavelength and 1550 nm is lesser attenuated with a good SNR when as against other wavelengths considered in this study. Also, the power scintillation index increases with link range, hence while designing an efficient FSO systems; the required margin needed for a particular system outage probability must be allocated to the fading loss.