Performance Analysis of Multihop Free Space Optical Communication System with Pointing Errors

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, we have derived closed form expressions for the outage probability and average capacity of multihop free space optical communication system, employing either decode and forward relaying or amplify and forward relaying. The atmospheric channel is characterized by an aggregate channel model, which includes atmospheric attenuation, atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors. Gamma-Gamma channel model is used to model the turbulence of the atmosphere, and pointing error effects are considered by jitter standard deviation parameter. The results obtained from the analytical expressions are verified by Monte Carlo simulation. The performance of the multihop free space optical communication system improves with hop count for both relaying techniques, for same link length. The pointing error deteriorates the performance of the system under consideration, and the performance of a decode and forward relaying is better than the amplify and forward relaying, in terms of both average capacity and outage probability.