Experimental investigations on an FSO-fiber converged communication system under fog and turbulence

Abstract

This paper presents experimental results for a free-space optical-fiber converged (FSO-FC) communication system under varying turbulence and foggy conditions. Based on the experimental measurements, we statistically characterize the FSO channel under different levels of turbulence and fog in terms of their respective probability density functions (PDFs). Our experimental PDFs fit well with the theoretical PDFs proposed in the literature. We experimentally evaluate the average bit error rate (ABER) of the considered FSO-FC communication system under different levels of turbulence and fog. Further, to compensate for the effects of turbulence and fog, we use multimode fiber as the receiver and compare the results with single-mode fiber as the receiver. Finally, we show the improvement in ABER under varying turbulence and fog by adding cyclic redundancy check bits to data bits.