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Prospects and Challenges of Free Space Optical Communications

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Ubiquitous Networking (UNet 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 11277))

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Abstract

Free space optical (FSO) transmission is a technology which uses a narrow laser beam to transmit the signal from the source to the destination through the free space. Although it has various advantages, a laser beam propagating through the atmosphere is subjected to different kind of disturbances causing the attenuation of the signal and, in some extreme conditions, leading to the link outage. In fact, the atmospheric turbulences and the chemical nature of the medium is the main source of link attenuation. In this paper, we present the different challenges of FSO communications: absorption, pointing errors, atmospheric turbulence and scattering phenomenon. Moreover, based on the strength of turbulences, we will detail the FSO channel modeling. Then, we introduce some techniques to overcome the weakness presented by FSO link under different strength of atmospheric turbulences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Engineering School of Tunis, SYSCOM Laboratory, University of Tunis El Manar, Tunis, Tunisia

    Abir Touati & Ammar Bouallegue

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    Farid Touati, Abderrazak Abdaoui & Amith Khandakar

Authors
  1. Abir Touati
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  2. Farid Touati
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  3. Abderrazak Abdaoui
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  4. Amith Khandakar
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  5. Ammar Bouallegue
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Abir Touati .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Carthage, Carthage, Tunisia

    Noureddine Boudriga

  2. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia

    Mohamed-Slim Alouini

  3. University of Carthage, Carthage, Tunisia

    Slim Rekhis

  4. Hassan II University, Casablanca, Morocco

    Essaid Sabir

  5. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Sofie Pollin

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Touati, A., Touati, F., Abdaoui, A., Khandakar, A., Bouallegue, A. (2018). Prospects and Challenges of Free Space Optical Communications. In: Boudriga, N., Alouini, MS., Rekhis, S., Sabir, E., Pollin, S. (eds) Ubiquitous Networking. UNet 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11277. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02849-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02849-7_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02848-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02849-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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