Impact of Clouds and Atmospheric Turbulence on HAPS-based FSO Systems

Abstract

This work investigates a system availability of high-altitude platform station (HAPS)-based free-space optical (FSO) system based on the observed cloud data from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF). The collected data is, then, used to evaluated the optical link availability for several regions in Vietnam. The numerical results reveal the advantage of using site diversity to combat cloud attenuation and atmospheric turbulence.