10 Gbps all-optical relay-assisted FSO system over a turbulence channel

Relay-assisted free space optics (FSO) communications becomes one of the promising solutions to improve the FSO link capabilities by implicitly reducing the transmission distance and exploiting distance-dependent fading variance of turbulence. Highly motivated by the capabilities of the system, this paper presents bit error rate (BER) performance of an all-optical 10-Gbps FSO relay based system using amplify-and-forward signaling is investigated through numerical simulations and experimental implementation. Results show that BER improves up to several orders of magnitudes when using relay based links over the same turbulent distance.