Simulation of FSO Transmission Channel

Abstract: The paper deals with the modeling and simulation of atmospheric Free-Space Optical (FSO) links. Due to the effect of atmospheric turbulence the links are characterized by outages in the order of tens of milliseconds, which are several orders of magnitude longer than the duration of frames (packets) being transmitted. For high transmission rates the optical channel can be simply modeled as a slowly varying AWGN channel. It allows computing the probability of the occurrence of errors in each packet by means of analytical formulae. The method is demonstrated on the simulation of channel coding for mitigating short fades for unidirectional link using the OOK modulation. Key-Words: Free-space optics, simulation, channel coding