Performance Analysis of Mixed Rayleigh and F Distribution RF-FSO Cooperative Systems with AF Relaying.

This paper proposes a dual-hop mixed radio frequency-free-space optical (RF-FSO) cooperative system with amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. The RF link is subject to Rayleigh fading and the FSO link is assumed to follow F -distributed fading with pointing error. The different types of detection, including intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) and coherent heterodyne detection (HD), are considered. The closed-form expressions for the cumulative distribution function (CDF), the moment generating function (MGF), and the moments of end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are derived. Furthermore, closed-form expressions for the outage probability, average bit error rate (BER), and ergodic capacity are presented. Asymptotic outage probability expressions are derived to obtain additional insights into the system performance. It is shown that the HD technique exhibits better performance than an IM/DD technique. The system performance is deteriorated by atmospheric turbulence and pointing error. Finally, analytical results are confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]