UAV-Based FSO Communication Under Jamming

This work studies the impact of jamming on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) transmitting to a ground station through free-space optical communication. The UAV transmission link gets deteriorated from Gaussian noise and jamming signal simultaneously. The optical channel is modeled as Gamma-Gamma for atmospheric turbulence with pointing error. The error performance of the system is evaluated and closed-form expression of the bit error rate (BER) is derived considering different degrees of jamming activity. The derived analytical results are confirmed by simulations. It is observed that as the probability of the jammer's activity raises from 0.1, the error performance of the system gets saturated. Furthermore, it is noted that the jammer has more adverse impact on system's BER than the Gaussian noise, irrespective of the turbulence regime. Additionally, the jammer aggravates the effect of turbulence on the system.