Availability Study of Atmospheric Gaussian Pulse Propagation with Normally Distributed Time Jitter for Optical Wireless Communication Systems

Free Space Optical communications are steadily emerging, due to the numerous and various benefits that they offer. Although FSO systems are based on a cheap, safe and efficient technology, there are many degrading effects that should be taken into account. In particular, long and fast links suffer from many existing effects, acting cumulatively, resulting in a not negligible deterioration of both performance and availability, as their length or bit rate increases. And that is because of the FSO pulse propagation through dispersive atmospheric channels, while short timed pulses are prone to be misdetected in adjacent time slots at the receiver, leading to disturbances in the bit stream, consequently. This work includes the estimation of FSO link performance, focusing on both the group velocity dispersion and the time jitter effects, calculated in terms of both probability of fade and outage probability, using closed form mathematical expressions. Then, interesting numerical results and conclusions are presented for typical FSO links' parameters.