Abstract

The design of high availability, high data rate free space optical communication networks is challenging due to link fragility. Clear-weather atmospheric turbulence and weather-related absorption losses due to fog and clouds can produce persistent link outages that conventional forward error correction schemes (channel coding and interleaving) are ineffective in mitigating. In prior work, we developed the so called Rateless Round Robin as a practical automatic repeat request algorithm to guarantee reliable delivery of packets across intermittent FSO point-to-point links. In this paper, we show how the Rateless Round Robin protocol can be applied in a free space optical communications network. We discuss explicit code designs for the Rateless Round Robin packet-level coding and show how the Rateless Round Robin can be extended to make integrated use of diversity to further enhance performance.

© 2011 Optical Society of America