Performance analysis for mixed [formula omitted] shadowed and exponentiated Weibull distributed dual-hop system with multiuser diversity in C-RAN

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of mixed radio-frequency/free-space optical (RF/FSO) system with multiuser diversity over mixed fading channels suitable for the Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN). Specifically, the considered system consists of K users, a decode-and-forward (DF) relay and a destination. The relay receives the data from the user with best channel conditions and forwards it to the destination. Furthermore, supposing that the RF link experiences κ−μ shadowed fading which combines small-scale multipath fading with line-of-sight shadowing, whereas the FSO link is subject to Exponentiated Weibull (EW) distributed turbulence. We first derived a novel probability density function (PDF) expression for the κ−μ shadowed fading so that the κ, m and can be equal to the arbitrary positive real value. Then, analytical expressions for the end-to-end outage probability (OP) and average bit error rate (ABER) of the overall network are derived assuming an intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) scheme. The closed-form asymptotic expressions at high signal-to-noise (SNR) regimes are also presented. Capitalizing on the asymptotic analysis, we can obtain the diversity gain and discuss the bottlenecks in the mixed RF/FSO systems. Additionally, the impact of several parameters, including the number of users, atmospheric turbulence conditions and pointing errors on the overall system are studied. The simulation results are provided to prove the feasibility of deployment of the system in real-life scenarios.