Performance Analysis of Mixed PLC-FSO Dual-Hop Communication Systems

In this article, we analyze the performance of a mixed dual-hop power line communication/free-space optical communication (PLC-FSO) transmission system supporting both decode-and-forward (DF) and fixed-gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying protocols. Further, it is assumed that the PLC link experiences log-normal fading under the effects of additive background and impulsive noise, while the free-space optical (FSO) channel obeys an exponentiated Weibull distribution with pointing errors. On this basis, we derive the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the end-to-end (e2e) signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To evaluate the system performance, the closed-form expressions for the outage probability (OP) and average bit-error rate (BER) are derived. Additionally, to gain more insights, the asymptotic analysis of OP and average BER, and the upper bound of the average capacity are presented.