WiMAX on FSO: Outage Probability Analysis

The transmission of multiple wireless signals over optical links has attained a great research interest nowadays. In case where optical fibers are difficult to be deployed, or installation cost is prohibited, optical wireless systems provide an efficient alternative means. In this paper, we consider the WiMAX (IEEE802.16) standard and construct a simple but adequate scenario to investigate radio signal transmission over terrestrial optical wireless channels. An appropriate system architecture is adopted and a channel model, which entails some of the most critical impairments of the optical channel, i.e., attenuation, turbulence, pointing error effects, as well as of the RF channel, i.e., path loss, shadowing, and Rayleigh fading, is taken into account. The overall link budget and a closed-form of the outage probability of the system are deduced. Several analytical results are depicted using a realistic set of parameter values, to lend a helpful insight to the performance of the proposed architecture.