Mobil FSO Activities in Europe and Fading Mitigation Approaches

Abstract

The increasing emergence of data services for mobile applications requires high-speed communication technologies. To this end, free-space optical (FSO) communications technology has the potential to outperform radio frequency (RF) systems. Within the last years, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has performed several demonstrations of mobile FSO systems. A brief overview of these activities is given in this paper. Mobil FSO mainly suffers from relatively long link outages, produced by temporary obscured laser-beams, pointing-and tracking-errors or deep signal-fades caused by index of refraction turbulence effects. Error correction and retransmission techniques for fading mitigation are discussed in this paper. Comparison of FEC and protocol based error correction for mobile FSO transmission is presented.