Modeling Transmission Degradation on FSO Links Caused by Weather Phenomena for WMN Optimization

International audienceThis work deals with wireless mesh networks (WMN) composed of FSO (free space optics) links. Although FSO links realize broadband transmission at low cost, their drawback is sensitivity to adverse weather conditions causing transmission degradation on multiple links. Hence, designing such FSO networks requires an optimization model to find the cheapest configuration of link capacities that will be able to carry an acceptable level of the demanded traffic in all weather states that can be foreseen in network operation. Such a model can be achieved using robust optimization techniques, and for that it is important to find a tractable way of characterizing possible link (capacity) degradation states corresponding to weather conditions not known in advance. In the paper we show how weather records can be translated to vectors of link capacity available (after degradation) in particular weather states, and how the resulting link degradation states may be represented mathematically in a compact and tractable way to be exploited in optimization. To solve the second task we will make use of a generalization of a combinatorial problem of finding a minimum hitting set to deduce a compact set approximating a given set of link degradation states. Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness of our model by means of a numerical study