Performance of Dual-Hop Hybrid FSO/RF System with Pointing Errors Optimization

Abstract

In this paper, a decode-and-forward (DF)-relaying-based hybrid free space optical (FSO)/radio frequency (RF) system is proposed. The hybrid system incorporates DF-relayingbased FSO and RF sub-systems, where FSO sub-system transmits with higher priority and RF sub-system is used in case of FSO link failure. The exact and asymptotic expressions for outage probability and average symbol error rate (SER) are derived and diversity order is determined. To minimize the effect of pointing errors, the optimum transmit beam width and radius of receiver aperture are calculated. The obtained theoretical results are verified with the Monte-carlo simulations. The results show that the proposed system improves the performance compared to that of individual FSO and RF systems. © 2020 IEEE.