Outage Performance for Mixed FSO-RF Transmission in Satellite-Aerial- Terrestrial Networks

• Published in: IEEE photonics technology letters Vol. 32; no. 21; pp. 1349 - 1352
• Main Authors: Liu, Xiaoyu, Lin, Min, Zhu, Wei-Ping, Wang, Jin-Yuan, Upadhyay, Prabhat K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.11.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptive optics; Amplification; Audio frequencies; Beamforming; Fading; Fading channels; Links; Mixed FSO-RF; Optical fiber communication; Optical transmitters; outage probability; Probability; Radio frequency; satellite-aerial-terrestrial network; Signal to noise ratio; transmit beamforming; Variable gain
• ISSN: 1041-1135; 1941-0174
• DOI: 10.1109/LPT.2020.3025452

This paper analyzes the outage performance of a satellite-aerial-terrestrial network (SATN), where the satellite-aerial and aerial-terrestrial links utilize free space optical (FSO) with Gamma-Gamma fading and radio frequency (RF) transmission with Rayleigh fading, respectively. In particular, by considering the impacts of pointing error in FSO links, and exploiting transmit beamforming (BF) with imperfect channel state information (CSI) in RF links, we derive an analytical expression for the outage probability (OP) of the considered SATN with a variable-gain amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol. Then, the asymptotical OP expression in high signal-to-noise ratio regime is presented to evaluate the achievable diversity order of the system. Finally, numerical results are given to confirm the validity of the theoretical formulas and reveal the effects of various parameters on the system performance.