A practical approach to improve optical channel utilization period for hybrid FSO/RF systems

Abstract

In hybrid FSO/RF systems, mostly a hard switching mechanism is preferred in case of the FSO signal level falls below to the predefined threshold. In this work, a computationally simple approach is proposed to increase the utilization of the FSO channels bandwidth advantage. For the channel, clear air conditions have been supposed with the atmospheric turbulence. In this approach, FSO bit rate is adaptively changed to achieve desired BER performance. An IM/DD modulation, OOK (NRZ format) has been used to show the benefit of the proposed method. Furthermore, to be more realistic with respect to the atmospheric turbulence variations within a day, some experimental observations have been followed up.