Statistical Channel Modeling for Long-Range Ground-to-Air FSO Links

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical channel model for long-range ground-to-air FSO links, incorporating various physical effects, and provides a closed-form outage probability expression to evaluate system performance.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analytical model for ground-to-air FSO channels that includes turbulence, wobbling, and divergence effects, advancing prior models.

Findings

Model accurately predicts channel behavior under various conditions.

Proposed model outperforms previous models in long-range scenarios.

Closed-form outage probability enables efficient performance evaluation.

Abstract

To provide high data rate aerial links for 5G and beyond wireless networks, the integration of free-space optical (FSO) communications and aerial platforms has been recently suggested as a practical solution. To fully reap the benefit of aerial-based FSO systems, in this paper, an analytical channel model for a long-range ground-to-air FSO link under the assumption of plane wave optical beam profile at the receiver is derived. Particularly, the model includes the combined effects of transmitter divergence angle, random wobbling of the receiver, jitter due to beam wander, attenuation loss, and atmospheric turbulence. Furthermore, a closed-form expression for the outage probability of the considered link is derived which makes it possible to evaluate the performance of such systems. Numerical results are then provided to corroborate the accuracy of the proposed analytical expressions and to prove the superiority of the proposed channel model over the previous models in long-range aerial FSO links.