Experimental performance evaluation of a Gbps FSO link: A case study

Wireless communications have been increasingly important. Besides Wi-Fi, FSO plays a very relevant technological role in this context. Performance is essential, resulting in more reliable and efficient communications. A FSO medium range link has been successfully implemented for high requirement applications at Gbps. An experimental performance evaluation of this link has been carried out at OSI layers 1, 4 and 7, through a specifically planned field test arrangement. Several results are presented and discussed, as obtained from simultaneous measurements of powers received by the laser heads, TCP, UDP and FTP experiments, resulting in determinations of TCP throughput, jitter, percentage datagram loss and FTP transfer rate. Conclusions are drawn about link performance.