Comprehensive Performance Analysis of Hovering UAV-Based FSO Communication System

Unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-based communications are expected to play an important role in the future generation wireless communication networks. It is a promising solution to enhance the wireless connectivity of devices without infrastructure. As compared to the terrestrial communications, UAVs offer various advantages such as line-of-sight (LoS) connectivity, dynamic deployment and flexible reconfiguration. Further, free space optics (FSO) communication is considered as a possible solution to enable UAV-based communication links due to its cost effective and high bandwidth nature. However, despite offering large bandwidth, UAV-based FSO links are marred by atmospheric path loss, atmospheric turbulence, non-zero boresight pointing errors, and angle-of-arrival (AoA) fluctuations. In this paper, the performance of a hovering UAV-based FSO communication system is investigated. The closed-form expressions for outage probability, average symbol error rate (SER), and ergodic capacity are derived taking into account both heterodyne (HD) and direct detection (DD) techniques for ground-to-UAV (G2U), UAV-to-UAV (U2U), and UAV-to-ground (U2G) links over the generalized Málaga distribution. Moreover, the asymptotic expressions for the above performance metrics are also derived to get the diversity gain of the system.