On the Performance of Hovering UAV-Based FSO Communication System

Abstract

Unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-based communications have recently gained popularity due to their line of sight (LoS) nature, dynamic, and cost effective deployment as compared to fixed infrastructures. Further, the consistent requirement of higher data rates for next-generation networks has encouraged the development of free space optics (FSO) communication. Due to the cost effective, license-free, LoS, and high bandwidth nature of FSO links, they are especially used for UAV-to-UAV connectivity. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a hovering UAV-based FSO communication system. The channel model takes into account the effect of four major impairments namely atmospheric path loss, atmospheric turbulence, non-zero boresight pointing errors, and angle-of-arrival (AoA) fluctuations. We derive the closed-form expressions for outage probability and average symbol error rate (SER) considering both heterodyne detection (HD) and intensity modulation/direct detection (IM/DD) techniques for UAV-to-UAV link over the generalized Malaga distribution. In addition, the asymptotic analysis is also carried out to obtain the asymptotic bounds and diversity gain of the system. © 2021 IEEE.