Enhancement of free space optical link in heavy rain attenuation using multiple beam concept

Abstract

Free space optics (FSO) has attracted a lot of attention for a variety of applications in telecommunications area, and it is dream of every researcher and telecommunication society to make it a real alternative solution for the last mile problem, to replace fiber optics. FSO is much preferred because of its low maintenance cost and deployment time. FSO with single-beam system is vulnerable to atmospheric attenuation, so to overcome this, a multiple-beam FSO transceiver system has become prominent and is usually used. In this paper, average rain attenuation is evaluated from the collected rain intensity data which are collected for a period of seven months, and implemented in the study concerning results relating link distance, and received optical power of using multiple-beam FSO system in tropical rainy weather. Comparison is made in terms of received optical power, geometrical losses, atmospheric losses, and bit error rate (BER) on using different number of optical beams, based on simulation at data rate of 1Gb/s. From the results it is clear that the quality of received power is improved by using up to four beams, along with link distance up to 1141.2m as compared to one-beam, two-beam, and three-beam, with link distances 833.3m, 991.0m, 1075.4m, respectively.