Performance Analysis of DF based Mixed Triple Hop RF-FSO-UWOC Cooperative System

In this manuscript, the performance analysis of a decode-and-forward (DF) based triple hop radio frequency-free space optical communication-underwater optical communication (RF-FSO-UWOC) system is discussed with closed-form expressions for outage probability and bit-error-rate (BER). The RF, FSO and UWOC links are characterized by Nakagami-m, Double Generalized Gamma (DGG) and Exponential Generalized Gamma (EGG) based channel fading, respectively. The RF link acts as a backbone network while the FSO link is used for last mile access and the UWOC link is used for underwater users. The numerical results show that the outage probability and BER of the system increases with the increase of the fading parameters of individual links such as atmospheric turbulence, pointing errors, salinity, bubble level and temperature gradient.