Weather-insensitive optical free-space communication using gain-saturated optical fiber amplifiers

This paper presents a weather-insensitive optical free-space communication (OFSC) method supporting optical packet channels. It operates optical fiber amplifiers (OFAs) used as boosters in gain-saturation regions. When the propagation loss gets too high, it decreases the average packet rate, or the average packet length, or both, to increase the optical power level launched into the free space. As a demonstration, 8 /spl times/ 10 Gigabit-Ethernet (GbE) channels were transmitted over a terrestrial distance of 2.4 km. One gain-saturated free-space optical repeater is used at the halfway.