Investigation of turbulence effect on the free space optical link for ground-to-train communications

There is a growing demand for high mobility and ultrafast internet/data services which drives the motivation for free space optical (FSO) communications for high speed trains. Here we present an FSO link for the ground-to-train communications, which consists of optical transceivers positioned alongside the track and on the roof of the train. When the train moves at a high speed, the airwave induced turbulence degrades the FSO link performance. In this paper the effect of turbulence is experimentally investigated and compared with the case of no turbulence.