Performance Analysis of Relay-Assisted OWC Over Foggy Channel with Pointing Error

Abstract: Signal fading due to atmospheric channel impairments and pointing error is a major bottleneck for the performance of optical wireless communication (OWC). In this paper, we consider an amplify-and-forward (AF) optical relaying to enhance the performance of the OWC system with a negligible line-of-sight (LOS) link under the combined effect of fog and pointing error. We analyze the end-to-end performance of the relay-assisted system, which consists of complicated probability distribution functions. We derive analytical expressions of the outage probability, average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and ergodic rate in terms of OWC system parameters. We also develop an exact integral-form expression of these performance metrics using the half-harmonic mean of individual SNRs to validate the tightness of the derived analytical expressions. The numerical and simulation analysis shows that the proposed dual-hop relaying has significant performance improvement when comparing to the direct transmission over considered channel impairments. Compared to the direct transmission, the relay-assisted system requires almost $30$ times less transmission power to achieve the same outage probability. The considered system also provides a significant gain in the average SNR and ergodic rate for practical scenarios of OWC deployment.