All-Optical FSO Relaying Under Mixture-Gamma Fading Channels and Pointing Errors

Abstract: The performance of all-optical dual-hop relayed free-space optical communication systems is analytically studied and evaluated. We consider the case when the total received signal undergoes turbulence-induced channel fading, modeled by the versatile mixture-Gamma distribution. Also, the misalignment-induced fading due to the presence of pointing errors is jointly considered in the enclosed analysis. The performance of both amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relaying transmission is studied, when heterodyne detection is applied. New closed-form expressions are derived regarding some key performance metrics of the considered system; namely, the system outage probability and average bit-error rate.