Reducing Turbulence-Induced Outages in a Deployed Terrestrial Free-Space Optical Communication Link via Interleaving

We present an experimental study of data interleaving for terrestrial free-space optical communication over a 4.6~km urban testbed. Results demonstrate a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in outage probability. A dependency between measured turbulence strength, interleaver length, and achievable data rate is revealed, enabling robust system design.