Terrestrial Wireless Optical Communication

Chapter 3

Channel Modeling

The signal response of the optical beam is affected by the channel characteristics discussed in the last chapter. While designing any communication system, few questions are significant, i.e., the range of power levels, the bit rates necessary for a given link length, the types of modulation and detection techniques to be used for good performance, etc. To a certain extent, these questions can be answered by collecting some experimental data, but that cannot be generalized to all situations. It certainly helps to know theoretically what signal response to expect from the channel. The endeavor in this chapter is to obtain the response of the atmospheric channel in terms of theoretical channel modeling. Similar to RF ...