Joint Transmission in Radio Frequency and Free Space Optical Links

Research Project, 2017

The goal of this project is to design, evaluate and analyze techniques for communication over hybrid radio frequency (RF) and free space optical (FSO), in short RF-FSO, links. Such combined links make it possible to compensate fading, turbulence and severe weather conditions, and improve the system performance significantly compared to the cases using only one of the links. We optimize the systems theoretically and numerically, and evaluate their performance by testbed implementations. Our specific innovative aims are to:

• Develop and evaluate practical joint data transmission schemes over hybrid RF-FSO links,
• Simulate and analyze the effect of different weather conditions on the system performance,

• Evaluate the system performance and design compensation techniques for data transmission in the presence of imperfect RF/FSO hardware. 

The project is an interdisciplinary cooperation between Dr. Behrooz Makki and Assistant Professor Koen Buisman at the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Microtechnology and Nanoscience, respectively. Also, along with the project, we are going to build up and RF-FSO testbed at Chalmers. The testbed is used to evaluate the performance of different joint data transmission schemes in RF-FSO systems.