Abstract
Weather conditions and chemical composition of the atmosphere are the most uncontrollable challenges for free-space optical (FSO) communications. Environmental parameters contribute directly in the characterization of atmospheric turbulence. Thus, it is very interesting to prepare a test setup to study the effect of such parameters on FSO transmissions especially in a region like Qatar, which is arid and has harsh climate. Unlike that of Europe and USA, Qatar’s climate is characterized by high temperatures throughout the year, exceeding 14 °C even in winter. The experiment was carried at Qatar University (QU) using a system that comprises of two Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) boards and two FSO terminals installed at 600 m apart from each other. Each terminal operates at 1550 nm and had a capacity of 1 Gb/s. On the other hand, the environment parameters were recorded using a weather station installed near the transmitter. To have a wider set of data for analysis, parameters from four different seasons were recorded and analyzed. We present a comparison between the FSO performances for the different seasons in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR). We notice a significant difference in the behavior of FSO during summer and winter seasons. Furthermore, using statistics on the data collected from the weather station and based on Blaunstein model (BKB), we correlate the FSO behavior to the variation of refractive index (Cn2) in winter. Also a closed form expression, estimated from the statistical data, has been derived to relate the PDR with environmental parameters for the summer season.
Highlights
In order to mitigate the Radio Frequency (RF) technology limitations, over the past decades, there has been a growing interest in free space optical (FSO) communications
We present a comparison between the FSO performances for the different seasons in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR)
It was found that the FSO link performs well in winter than in summer
Summary
In order to mitigate the Radio Frequency (RF) technology limitations, over the past decades, there has been a growing interest in free space optical (FSO) communications. In [11], the authors made some experimental tests related to the effect of scintillation on FSO link They found that the refractive index is highly affected by the ambient temperature and by the time of day. Studying extremely hot weather and moderate winter effects on FSO link in GCC countries can be considered as a major step towards a large-scale deployment of wireless optical communication technology in these countries. For this reason, in this work, we will briefly analyze the effects of some major environment parameters in Qatar on FSO link.
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