Outage Analysis of UAV-based FSO Systems Over Log-Normal Turbulence Channels

Free-space optical (FSO)communication systems have recently attracted an ever increasing popularity for data transfer between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although providing wide unlicensed bandwidth, the channel capacity of UAV-based FSO links is negatively affected by atmospheric turbulence-induced fading, pointing errors due to the position and orientation deviations of hovering UAVs along with interruption probability due to the joint effects of angle-of-arrival fluctuations and receiver field-of-view limitations. Due to these undesirable limitations, outage probability is commonly considered as an important metric for performance analysis in FSO links. So, in this paper, we derive the closed-form expression for outage probability of UAV-based FSO links. To confirm the accuracy of the proposed analytical results, we compare these outage rates to those provided by Monte-Carlo simulations.