AVAILABILITY AND QUEUE PERFORMANCE OF A HYBRID OPTICAL/RF CHANNEL

The performance of network nodes equipped with hybrid free space optical (FSO) and radio frequency (RF) links is analyzed. The availability of optical or RF wireless chan- nels is influenced by unpredictableoutage events caused by various physical processes in the atmosphere. This work examines the impact of channel and path diversity for de- signing networks with high availability. Considering finite state Markov chain models for characterizing FSO and RF capacity variations in time, the number of hybrid links re- quired at a node to maintain availability at prescribed val- ues is derived. Availabilityis analyzedconsideringbothav- erage outage durations and their probability distributions. The queueing delay experienced at a node due to the chan- nel outages is also examined as a function of number of hybrid links provisioned at the node.