Current Optical Technologies for Wireless Access

The objective of this paper is to describe recent activities and investigations on free-space optics (FSO) or optical wireless and the excellent results achieved within SatNEx an EU-framework 6(th) programme and IC 0802 a COST action. In a first part, the FSO technology is briefly discussed. In a second part, we mention some performance evaluation criterions for the FSO. In third part, we briefly discuss some optical signal propagation experiments through the atmosphere by mentioning network architectures for FSO and then discuss the recent investigations in airborne and satellite application experiments for FSO. In part four, we mention some recent investigation results on modelling the FSO channel under fog conditions and atmospheric turbulence. Additionally, some recent major performance improvement results obtained by employing hybrid systems and using some specific modulation and coding schemes are presented.