Performance Analysis of Amplify-and-Forward Dual-Hop Mixed RF/FSO Systems

In this paper, the performance analysis of the fixed gain amplify-and-forward (AF) based dual-hop asymmetric radio frequency (RF)/free space optical (FSO) communication system is performed. The RF link is assumed to follow the Nakagami-m distribution and the FSO link follows the Gamma-Gamma distribution. For this mixed RF/FSO communication system, new and finite power series based mathematical expressions of cumulative distribution function, probability density function, and moment generating function of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio are derived. Using them, novel finite power series based expressions for the outage probability and the average bit error rate are obtained for various modulation techniques. Similar analysis is performed for the scenario when the FSO link undergoes significant pointing errors. Simulation results validate the proposed mathematical analysis.