A New Method of Predicting Continental Fog Attenuations for Terrestrial Optical Wireless Link

Free space optics (FSO) is getting increased popularity during last few years due to its increased power efficiency for reasonably longer distances. Moreover, it provides data rates that can cater for our future broadband telecommunication requirements besides resolving the last mile access bottleneck. But FSO links are subjected to various kinds of signal deteriorations and attenuations due to different weather conditions- clouds, sleet, rain, snow and especially fog that can lead signal attenuations up to few hundreds of dB/km. In this paper, we present comparison and analysis of measured optical signal attenuation for continental fog case and propose a new method of predicting continental fog attenuations from measured temperature and relative humidity values.