# Effects of Atmospheric Turbulence on Optical Wireless Communication in NEOM Smart City
## 1 Introduction  
According to the United Nations, more than 55% of the world, population live in urban areas, and this value is expected to reach 68% by 2050 [1]. Unplanned urbanization may lead to challenges, such as depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation, and additional pressure on public services. To address these issues, the concept of smart cities has emerged [2, 3, 4]. Many countries, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), have adopted smart city development as a key initiative. From 1980 to 2018, the population of Saudi Arabia increased from 9.32 million to 26.30 million, corresponding to an increase of nearly three times [5]. In addition, 90% of the areas are expected to be urbanized by 2050 [5]. These aspects are expected to introduce additional pressure on the infrastructure, includingutilities, housing, and transportation. Moreover, it may be challenging to ensure the quality of healthcare and education. To address these challenges, a smart city initiative has been announced by the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs in ten cities across KSA [6]. Among these cities, the most prominent is NEOM city. The NEOM city is unlike any other planned smart city in KSA; this city is to be built from the ground up to avoid the repetition of the standard city features. In 2017, Crown Prince [PERSON] announced the foundation of this city as a future investment. It will be located in the northern region of the Red Sea, bordering Jordan and Egypt [6]. The NEOM zone is expected to focus on nine advanced technology dimensions, including: energy, water, mobility, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, media, entertainment, digital sciences, tourism, and sport [6; 7]. Researchers have begun to explore different aspects and challenges associated with these sectors, such as the use of renewable energy and air pollution management [8; 9; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14]. The key technology to ensuring the success of any smart city is wireless technology for communication [15; 16]. In August 2020, NEOM CEO Mr. [PERSON] announced a plan to launch a center for innovation at the NEOM city to explore 5G communication aspects and its opportunities in the region [17]. The deployment of 5G across NEOM is expected to enable the incorporation of many emerging applications such as the internet of things (IoT), virtual reality, smart homes, and autonomous vehicles. In this context, wireless optical technologies such as free-space optical (FSO) have been considered, and they are promising solutions that can provide high-speed information transmission links to explore the full potential of a 5G network, realizing a speed of 100 Gbit/s or more [18; 19; 20]. The main drawback of the FSO link is that its performance is strongly dependent on local weather conditions. As the weather changes, the performance of the FSO link changes. Therefore, before deploying FSO links, it is necessary to analyze the atmospheric conditions in the region. Many researchers have investigated the performance and reliability of FSO under a variety of weather conditions in different countries [21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32]. To the best of the authors' knowledge, none of the existing studies have examined the influence of the atmospheric turbulence on the FSO communication framework recommended for use in the NEOM city. Based on the NEOM 2019 and 2020 daily meteorological data provided by the Saudi National Center for Meteorology (NCM), we investigated the effect of atmospheric turbulence on FSO link performance by using the macro-meteorological model. The result demonstrates that temperature has the greatest impact on the FSO system when compared with other meteorological components studied. Therefore, the FSO link performance in winter can be superior to that in summer. The result shows that the FSO technology is feasible under the parameters used in this study and therefore can be adopted for NEOM city. The remaining paper is organized as follows: Section 2 illustrates the literature review.