Performance Analysis of the Asymmetric Dual-Hop Relay Transmission With Mixed RF/FSO Links

TLDR

FSO links can provide wider bandwidths than RF links. The letter analyzes the performance of a dual‑hop relay system with asymmetric RF/FSO links. An exact closed‑form expression for the end‑to‑end outage probability of the RF/FSO relay links is derived. The RF/FSO links exhibit slightly worse performance than RF/RF links, but the gap narrows with increasing SNR, and the analytical results match Monte Carlo simulations.

Abstract

This letter reports a performance analysis of a dual-hop relay system composed of asymmetric radio-frequency and free-space optics (RF/FSO) links. This approach is based on the fact that FSO links can provide even wider bandwidths as compared to RF ones. In particular, an exact closed-form expression for the end-to-end outage probability of the RF/FSO relay links is derived. Overall, the RF/FSO links show a slightly worse performance than the RF/RF links, but the performance gap is gradually reduced as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) increases. Our mathematical analysis results were verified by exactly matching Monte Carlo simulation results.