DF Relaying in Cooperative Free Space Optical Communication System in Presence of Jammer

Relay-assisted cooperative free space optical (FSO) communication system is a powerful technique, which offers advantages like fading mitigation and significant gain in spatial diversity due to shorter transmission hops. Even so, it can be hampered by jamming activities which in turn degrade the overall system performance. In this paper, the effect of relay jamming in the decode-and-forward (DF) protocol based cooperative FSO communication system, is introduced and studied thoroughly. The probability density function (pdf) of a random variable containing mixture of the negative exponential and Gaussian random variables is derived. The error performance of the considered FSO system is analysed over this new kind of additive mixture noise for different probabilities of jamming. By utilizing the derived pdf, a closed-form expression of the average bit error rate (BER) of the DF FSO relaying is obtained. A comparison of the BER performance of maximum-likelihood (ML) detector and a derived threshold based detector is also provided. It is observed that the derived threshold based detector offers almost similar performance as that of the ML detector. A thorough numerical study is also provided by considering different pointing error parameters of jammer's and user's channels.