Performance Investigation of UAV-aided FSO Communication System under Diverse Weather Conditions
Keywords:
Atmospheric conditions, Bit Error Rate (BER), Eye diagram, Line-of-sight (LoS), UAV-FSO technologyAbstract
The demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has surged significantly, primarily due to their ability to access remote and restricted areas. UAVs are extensively utilised in applications such as military surveillance, disaster response, backhaul communication, and geospatial mapping. In addition to that, free space optical (FSO) communication offers a promising high- bandwidth, line-of-sight (LoS) high-speed data transfer with unlicensed spectrum and secure connections as an alternative to traditional wireless systems and conventional radio frequency (RF) systems. Thus, integrating UAVs with FSO technology offers a versatile, dependable, and high-speed communication platform. However, its performance is highly susceptible to atmospheric conditions, like fog, snow, and rain. Through detailed simulation and analysis, the performance of the UAV-integrated FSO system has been analysed in this study under diverse atmospheric conditions, employing eye diagrams to visualise the impact of signal attenuation and degradation. The findings indicate that system performance is significantly influenced by atmospheric conditions. Among these, foggy conditions have the most detrimental impact on system performance due to Mie scattering, followed by snow and then rain.
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