Terrestrial Free Space Optical Links for High Bandwidth Connectivity

Free space optics (FSO) is rapidly gaining popularity as an effective means of transferring data at high rates over short distances. Light beams propagating through the atmosphere carry the information from the optical transmitter to the receiver. FSO facilitates rapidly deployable, lightweight, high-bandwidth communication without licensing fee and tariffs. We present FSO system and network concepts, modeling of the terrestrial (near ground) channel, modulation and channel coding aspects and investigations in estimating the probability density function