Abstract
Recent advances demonstrate satellite communication (SatCom) as a potent enabler for future Terabit/s global connectivity. Existing SatCom systems, however, rely mostly on radio frequency (RF) transmission, whose limited available bandwidth is the main bottleneck for further data rate increases. Free-space optical (FSO) communication links, with huge license-free bandwidth, have emerged as an attractive alternative. Despite their ability to deliver high-throughput transmissions, FSO communications are weather-dependent and susceptible to atmospheric turbulence. Hybrid FSO/RF and space-air-ground (SAG) FSO transmissions are possible solutions to increase the reliability of FSO-based transmission systems. A strategically deployed unmanned-aerial vehicle, acting as a relay, can successfully mitigate the adverse effect of atmospheric turbulence, while the hybrid FSO/RF transmission can address weather-dependent effects. These solutions can also be integrated to create a system with significantly improved performance and reliability. To evaluate the performance of the resulting integrated transmission system, we analyze the outage probability and average symbol error probability in this work. Asymptotic expressions are also derived to get further insight into the system behavior and calculate the overall diversity gain. Furthermore, we consider the optimal design of switching thresholds. The numerical results show that the integrated transmission system achieves about 10 dB performance gain over existing solutions for both downlink and uplink scenarios.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-13 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 30 2023 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2023-06-05Acknowledgements: This work was supported in part by a Discovery grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Automotive Engineering
- Applied Mathematics
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Aerospace Engineering