Experimental study of the atmospheric turbulence influence on FSO communication system

Atmospheric turbulence is the main factor which communication system, in order to analyze the effect of the atmospheric turbulence on the performance of atmospheric FSO communication, optimize and improve the performance of atmospheric FSO communication, an experiment has been carried out. First, the bit error rate (BER) of an Intensity Modulation(IM)/Direct detection (DD) FSO communication system caused by atmospheric turbulence has been studied, the expression of BER is given. A three-month experiment of atmospheric FSO communication has been done, on a 6.2km links. The experimental results show that: The correlation between the BER and the scintillation index is very high, the longer the measuring time is, the higher correlation is. A higher rate of communication requires a better communication environment. For a 100Mbps FSO communication system, there is no bit error when the scintillation index is below 0.4, the BER of the whole day is below 10
^-7
. For a 500Mbps FSO communication system, the critical value of BER is about 0.2, the BER of the whole day is below 10
^-6
.