On the Interaction Between Meteorological Conditions and Performance Optimization in MISO Free-Space Optical Communication

In this paper, we investigate the effect of meteorological conditions on the performance of a multiple-input single-output (MISO) free-space optical (FSO) communication system. First, by taking into account the effect of pointing error and turbulence, we derive an analytical channel model. Second, we derive a closed-form expression for the outage probability and the average link availability. We further analyze the complexity-performance trade-off and then we propose two beamwidth optimization methods to maximize the overall availability of the system in different weather conditions. We show that a significant performance improvement is achieved by using optimum adaptive beamwidth or by increasing the number of transmitters. The efficiency of the proposed method is validated through simulations using realistic meteorological data of Tehran, Iran.