Relay-assisted free-space optical communication

  • Authors:
  • M. Safari;M. Uysal

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications - Part 2
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In this paper, we present relay-assisted transmission as a powerful fading mitigation tool for free-space optical systems operating in atmospheric turbulence channels. We study both serial (i.e., multi-hop transmission) and parallel (i.e., cooperative diversity) relaying encoupled with amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward modes. We consider an aggregated channel model which takes into account both path-loss and turbulence-induced log-normal fading. Since fading variance is distance-dependent in free-space optical systems, relay-assisted transmission takes advantage of the resulting shorter hops and yields significant performance improvements. We derive outage probability of the relaying schemes under consideration which are further confirmed through Monte-Carlo simulations. Our outage probability analysis demonstrates that an impressive performance improvement of 18.5 dB is possible with the use of a single relay at a target outage probability of 10-6.