AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF FSO LINK PERFORMANCE IN NUR-SULTAN CLIMATE

Abstract

Recently, Free Space Optical communication (FSO) has received increased attention in the field of wireless communication due to its advantages such as high data rate, license-free use and immunity to electromagnetic interference. Due to its advantages, FSO found many places in various applications to build point-to-point wireless links. FSO has also drawbacks, for example, any obstacle between the transceivers degrades the performance of the FSO link. Moreover, FSO links are highly dependent on weather conditions. Weather conditions are the main factor that causes attenuation of the FSO links. In this study, we conducted a series of measurement experiments in the city of Nur-Sultan in Kazakhstan. The city of Nur-Sultan has a severely continental climate with very cold (on average -14.5 ° C in January) and dry winters, providing us with a unique opportunity to assess the FSO links in severe winter conditions. We conducted several measurements to observe the changes in the received power in different weather conditions. The path loss during snowfall was the greatest in the absence of observations in rain and fog. The path losses obtained from our measurements and the ones reported in the literature were approximately equal at positive temperatures in clear weather and in snowy events with a snowfall rate of above 1 mm/h. However, they were slightly different in negative temperatures and at a snowfall rate of less than 1 mm/h. The maximum path loss in our measurements with a link distance of 212m was observed at a snowfall speed of 4.7 mm/h as 8.66 dB as compared to clear sky.