Distribution function for continental and maritime fog environments for optical wireless communication

Abstract

Free space optics (FSO) links in the troposphere are highly dependent on different atmospheric effects, which vary according to different climatic conditions. For terrestrial FSO links, fog is the most critical of all atmospheric effects causing optical signal attenuations up to 480 dB/km in dense maritime fog environments and 130 dB/km in moderate continental fog environments. In this paper a brief analysis of modified gamma particle size distribution (PSD) parameters for dense maritime fog and moderate continental fog is presented and discussed on the basis of standard reference data available. Moreover, an effort was made to briefly analyse and compare our measured continental and maritime fog attenuation data on the basis of Mie scattering parameters and the standard modified gamma PSD parameters, in order to estimate the values of modified gamma parameters and the total attenuation for the two kinds of fog environments.