Performance measurements of a 1550 nm Gbps FSO link at Covilhã city, Portugal

The importance of wireless communications, involving electronic and electro optical devices, has been growing. FSO is a very important technology in this context. A very high speed 1550 nm FSO link over 1.14 km has been successfully implemented for purposes of high requirement applications at Gbps, at the University of Beira Interior Campus located at Covilha city, Portugal. An experimental performance evaluation of this link has been carried out at various OSI levels (1, 4, and 7), through a specifically planned field test arrangement. Several results, obtained namely from simultaneous measurements of powers received by the laser heads, TCP, UDP and FTP experiments, are presented and discussed. Conclusions are drawn about link performance.