Performance Analysis of FSO Link under Different Weather Conditions and Modulation Formats

In the past few decades, Free Space Optics (FSO) has gained importance over the RF/microwave transmission systems due to the availability of license free spectrum and long range operations.Free Space Optical communication system has many advantages such as compact size, large bandwidth, lower cost and lease for implementation.Free Space Optical communication system also suffers from few limitations such as beam dispersion, atmospheric attenuation, and scintillation.One of the most significant limitations of FSO is the dependence of the performance of FSO system on the weather conditions.In this paper, a 10 Gbps FSO system has been designed and analyzed for different weather conditions and modulation formats at varying distances.From the results, it can be seen that as we move from clear weather conditions to heavy fog weather conditions, Q factor of the received signal and maximum transmission distance both decreases.Also, NRZ modulation format performs better as compared to other modulation formats in an FSO communication link.