Outage Probability Analysis and Altitude Optimization of a UAV-Enabled Triple-Hop Mixed RF-FSO-Based Wireless Communication System

Abstract

In this paper, we present the evaluation of network parameters for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled triple-hop mixed RF/FSO-based wireless communication system, where one relay is a fixed relay and the second relay is a UAV which acts as decode-and-forward relay for communication from the base station (B) to the multiple mobile users (Mi), i∈{1,2⋯N}. The first hop from B to fixed relay (R1) is the radio frequency (RF) link modeled using α−κ−μ fading distribution, the second hop from the relay R1 to the UAV relay (R2) is a free space optics (FSO) link modeled using Gamma-Gamma fading, and the third hop from R2 to the Mi is, again, an RF link modeled using the Rayleigh fading model. The direct communication between the B and the Mi is not feasible due to the very large distance. We derive the closed form analytical expression for the outage probability of the proposed system and find the effect of the base system parameters on the performance of the system. We also analyze the outage probability of the system at high SNR values to get further insights of the system performance. In addition, altitude optimization of UAV is carried out to know the optimal elevation angle in correspondence with UAV’s optimal altitude in order to maximize performance of the system.