A performance study of a hybrid 5G RF/FSO transmission system

This work presents a study on the performance of a hybrid 5G RF/FSO communication system. Both transmitter and receiver communicate through two paths: the first link operates under Radio-Frequency (RF) technology, assumed to undergo a Weibull fading channel, while the second link operates under Free Space Optical (FSO) technology, subject to Málaga-M turbulence model with the presence of pointing error impairment. Both incoming signals are combined at the receiver side using Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) technique. We retrieve, in particular, the Moment Generating Function (MGF) of the total Signal-toNoise Ratio (SNR). Based on that, we present the exact closedform expression of the Average Symbol Error Rate (ASER) of the considered RF/FSO system for different modulations schemes in terms of the bivariate Fox's H-Function.