Performance Analysis and Altitude Optimization of UAV-Enabled Dual-Hop Mixed RF-UWOC System

Abstract

This paper presents and investigates a dual-hop mixed radio frequency (RF) and underwater optical communication (UWOC) system. In the proposed system, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) such as drone (S) located at low altitude is transmitting data signal towards the destination (D) which is located under water such as a submarine through a decode and forward (DF) relay (R) mounted on a ship over the sea surface. The data signal is transmitted from the UAV towards the relay located on the ship via RF channel modelled by the Nakagami- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ m$</tex-math></inline-formula> distributed fading statistics. The relay decodes the received RF data signal and re-transmits it towards the destination via visible light channel modelled by Exponential Generalized Gamma (EGG) distribution. Using the DF relaying protocol, we derive closed form analytical expressions for the outage probability and average bit error rate of the proposed mixed RF-UWOC system. Additionally, UAV optimal altitude analysis has been carried out to find the optimal elevation angle corresponding to the optimal altitude of the UAV where the system performance is maximized. The numerical simulation is carried out to support the performance analysis of the mixed RF-UWOC system and shows the influence of the various channel parameters such as air bubbles, UAV altitude, water salinity variations and scintillation on the end to end performance of the mixed RF-UWOC system.