Availability Modeling of FSO/RF Mesh Networks through Turbulence-Induced Fading Channels

Even if a line-of-sight condition of Free Space Optics (FSO) is satisfied, atmospheric-induced fading, scattering, and attenuation may severely deteriorate the availability of the communication link. This argument is true except in reconfigurable FSO ad hoc networks, a path reconfiguration scheme replaces a severed FSO link with an operational one. Reconfigurability, as a property of our hybrid FSO/RF (Radio Frequency) work in progress, provides connection reliability and network throughput. The traffic can be directed to a different FSO link or even an RF link as backup. Hence, node failure and outage probabilities due to link failure will be reduced, thus resulting in a higher availability of nodes. Mathematical investigation and statistical consideration of availability and capacity of FSO/RF ad hoc mesh network is the focus of this paper. We assume normalized scintillation fading channels in our analysis. We apply different availability cases of channel state information to derive closed-form expressions for system capacity.