Outage Performance Analysis for UAV-Based Mixed Underwater-FSO Communication Under Pointing Errors

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the outage performance of a mixed optical wireless communication (OWC) system consisting of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) communicating with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) via a buoying relay. More precisely, the considered setup uses an AUV that transmits a data stream to a decode-and-forward (DF) buoy relay using underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC). The buoy relay then stablishes a free space optical (FSO) link to send the data to the UAV final destination. Our model considers the effect of weak turbulence and pointing error for both UOWC and FSO links. We further analyze the importance of designing an optimal beam width in order to achieve the lowest outage probability of the total emitter-destination link. Numerical results are presented to confirm and support the accuracy of our derived analytical expressions.