Implementation and Evaluation of a 10 Gbps Real-time FSO Link

In this paper, we present and experimentally evaluate a real-time 10 Gbps free-space optical (FSO) link under varying atmospheric conditions. In bandwidth-craving wireless technologies due to the ubiquitous consumption by internet of things devices and requiring high data rate online services, unlicensed FSO systems can be a promising candidate to satisfy the network capacity of the existing data communications technologies. In this work, we verify the experiment using small form-factor pluggable transceivers mounted FPGA as a FSO transmitter and receiver. Here, a high-speed single FSO link is proposed and its performance under turbulence and fog conditions using the dedicated indoor atmospheric chamber is evaluated. We show that the proposed system under the turbulence condition with a scintillation index of 0.35 offers the same data rate as the link under a clear channel, while the bit error rate increases from 10-12 to 5 × 10-4.