Effects of haze particles and fog droplets on NLOS ultraviolet communication channels

The performance of non-line-of-sight ultraviolet (UV) scattering communication depends largely on atmospheric parameters. In this paper, we consider haze, fog, two common types of aerosols, and introduce the density and size of aerosols as variables to study the channel path loss for the UV scattering communications. We modify a Monte-Carlo based multiple-scattering model and provide fitting functions to replace the complex calculations of Mie theory, which can be used to obtain the atmospheric coefficients and phase functions for the aerosols. Simulation results reveal that, given fixed elevation angles, the channel path loss is related to both communication range, the aerosol density, and size of aerosols. For a short communication range, an increase of aerosol density can reduce the path loss, which improves the performance of UV scattering communication. However, when the communication range is extended, the path loss will fall first and then rise with density of aerosols. This phenomenon also occurs for an increase of fog drop size. The density or size of aerosols that has the lowest path loss is inversely proportional to the communication range.