Rural Optical-Propagation Measurements

Abstract

Compared with traditional communication technologies like wired or radio frequency communications, optical wireless communication has a unique fading behavior of the received signal, that does not allow to use existing channel models without modification. In this paper the statistics of received optical power obtained from experimental data are compared to often used statistical mathematical models. These models are the log-normal and the gamma-gamma distribution. It was found that the gamma-gamma gives better fits to the measured data, but the quality of the log-normal fits is sufficient for most needs. This means that the log-normal distribution can be used for the development of simplified channel models which have a better mathematical tractability than the models based on the gamma-gamma distribution.