Performance Analysis of Dual-Hop FSO Cooperative Systems over ℱ Turbulence with Pointing Errors

Abstract

Recently, atmospheric-turbulence-induced fading in free-space optical (FSO) communication with pointing error impairment was modeled and studied using the Fisher–Snedecor F distribution with a good fit to experimental data. In this letter, we investigate the end-to-end performance of dual-hop FSO fixed-gain relaying systems operating over F turbulence channels. More specifically, we present closed-form expressions for the cumulative distribution function and the probability density function of the end-to-end signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio of the proposed system. Consequently, the outage probability, ergodic capacity, and average bit error rate performance are derived with tight asymptotic results in high-SNR regimes to gain more insight into the impacts of system parameters and channel turbulence conditions. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are provided to validate the analytical results, revealing a significant performance gain compared to a single FSO link in the medium- to high-SNR range by using dual-hop FSO relaying.