Experimental performance evaluation of weak turbulence channel models for FSO links

Outdoor wireless communication is subject to several outdoor environment conditions. Among them, atmospheric turbulence which happens on a daily basis, introduces signal fading and degrades the system performance. Many channel models have been proposed in the literature to model the turbulence fading in free space optic (FSO) communication systems. In this work, we aim to evaluate the performance of some key proposed channel models for FSO systems under weak turbulence condition. First, an outdoor experimental setup is utilized to measure the turbulence fading and build a dataset. The setup is all-optical, which gives us the advantage of isolating the solar radiation noise during measurements. Second, the obtained dataset is used to investigate the performance of five key FSO channel models claimed to perform well under weak turbulence conditions. The results show that for very weak turbulence with scintillation index (SI) < 10(-3), four models that claim to work well under such condition failed to fit the dataset. For weak turbulence with SI> 10(-3), all the models fit the dataset except I-K model. Third, we exploited the obtained dataset to propose a new empirical channel model that has good performance under weak turbulence conditions. Using this model, we studied the outage probability of FSO system under the joint effect of weak turbulence and fog attenuation.