FSO/RF Hybrid Network Availability Analysis Under Different Weather Condition

Free space Optic (FSO) links have the tremendous potential to fulfil high data rate requirements of future communication applications. However, the widespread growth of FSO has been hampered by availability and reliability issues. FSO links are highly weather dependent and attenuating factor like fog causes reduced link availability for considerable amount of time. The alternate solution is to use RF back up links that are less susceptible to weather attenuations. In this paper, the availability of hybrid FSO/RF network has been analyzed under different weather attenuating condition like fog, rain and snow. The availability analysis has been performed using measured attenuation data.