Outage analysis of RF/FSO using incremental and selective relay technique

Abstract

In this paper, the performance of a transmission system composed of a direct path and a dual-hop relay path by using incremental and selective relay technique is presented. Direct path consists of RF link while the relay link is composed of mixed radio frequency (RF) and free space optical (FSO) link. End-to-end outage performance using incremental and selective relaying strategy is analysed in which source to relay link is RF and relay to destination is FSO link. A closed form expression of outage probability is derived under the combined channel model which takes into account misalignment effect and turbulence effect by using the Meijer's G functions. Moreover, the effects of thermal noise and shot noise are also included in this model. The results demonstrated that incremental and selective relay technique achieves significant performance gain in strong turbulent channel and diversity is also achieved by increasing the number of relays.