Reducing Turbulence-Induced Outages in a Deployed Terrestrial Free-Space Optical Communication Link via Interleaving

2026-06-15

AI Summary

This study addresses the severe degradation of reliability in terrestrial free-space optical communication caused by atmospheric turbulence, which frequently leads to link outages. Conducted over a 4.6-km urban experimental link, the work systematically investigates the effectiveness of data interleaving in mitigating turbulence-induced impairments. It establishes, for the first time, a quantitative relationship among interleaving depth, turbulence strength, and achievable data rate, enabling principled optimization of interleaving parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces link outage probability by two orders of magnitude while maintaining high data throughput, thereby substantially enhancing communication robustness. These findings provide critical theoretical insights and practical engineering guidance for the design of real-world free-space optical communication systems operating under turbulent atmospheric conditions.

Abstract

We present an experimental study of data interleaving for terrestrial free-space optical communication over a 4.6~km urban testbed. Results demonstrate a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in outage probability. A dependency between measured turbulence strength, interleaver length, and achievable data rate is revealed, enabling robust system design.

Problem

• free-space optical communication
• atmospheric turbulence
• outage probability
• terrestrial link
• turbulence-induced outages

Innovation

• free-space optical communication
• data interleaving
• atmospheric turbulence
• outage probability
• terrestrial link