When Does This Solution Not Fit?
Optical wireless technology is not without its limitations, and because of these limitations,
there are applications where this solution does not make sense. One such limitation
is the dependency of its performance on weather conditions. As was discussed, FSO
links can experience severe attenuation during heavy fog conditions, and the degree
of such attenuation is a function of link distance, with longer links experiencing more
outage than shorter links. Therefore, FSO technology does not make sense in applications
where link lengths are fairly long. For example, links that are shorter than
100 m can achieve 100 percent availability, whereas links that are more than 1 km cannot
be guaranteed to achieve 100 percent link availability. Based on the type of FSO
system and local weather conditions, such links can be expected to achieve availability
between 95 percent and 99 percent. Therefore, optical wireless mesh technology is not
well suited for applications requiring long-range reach.
FSO links also require direct line-of-sight (LOS). Therefore, FSO technology by itself
is not well suited for applications that do not have direct LOS.
Pages:
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628