Analysis of free space optical link in turbulent atmosphere

Free space optical (FSO) communication is an upgraded supplement to the existing wireless technologies. FSO technology provides vast modulation bandwidth, unlicensed spectrum, cost effective deployment, low power consumption and less mass requirement. Today, researchers are preliminary focused to use the free space communication systems for inter satellites links. In this paper, the performance analysis of FSO communication link in weak atmospheric turbulence has been analyzed for different atmospheric transmission windows using OOK modulation. The analysis has been done using bit error rate as the performance metric. The effect of attenuation on the link performance has been investigated by varying distance between transmitter and receiver for a given power and data rate. Further, BER performance analysis has been carried out for varying data rate and transmitted power. Also, the effect of attenuation on received optical power has been studied. The work has been performed in OptSim environment.