Performance Analysis of Mixed Interference Aligned MIMO RF/Unified FSO DF Relaying With Heterodyne Detection and Two IMDD Models

This paper considers a dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) mixed radio frequency (RF)/free space optical (FSO) relaying scheme. In this scheme, the first hop is a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) RF interference channel (IC), while the second hop is an FSO channel in which heterodyne detection (HD) as well as intensity modulation-direct detection (IMDD) are considered in a unified analysis manner. It is assumed that the MIMO RF links follow Rayleigh fading, whilst the FSO link encounters Málaga ($\mathcal {M}$ ) fading with pointing errors. In this work, the Interference alignment (IA) technique is utilized in the MIMO RF IC hop to eliminate the interference, and hence this leads to enhance the multiplexing gain in this hop, and accordingly the overall system performance is improved. The design of the IA precoding matrix and receiving interference eliminating matrix is performed by using adapting orthogonalized minimum leakage (OR-ML) algorithm. For the considered scheme, exact closed-form expressions are derived for the outage probability and ergodic capacity, in these expressions the best-known FSO channel capacity results are utilized. Moreover, not only the IMDD input-independent AWGN but also the IMDD cost-dependent AWGN channel is analyzed in these investigations. In addition, the system performance is studied asymptotically at the high SNRs region, where the diversity order and coding gain analyses are illustrated. Further, we allocate simulation results that verify the deduced analytical and asymptotic expressions.