Performance Analysis of ARQ-based RF-FSO Links

Abstract: In this letter, we study the performance of hybrid radio-frequency (RF) and free-space optical (FSO) links using automatic repeat request (ARQ). We derive closed-form expressions for the message decoding probabilities, throughput, and outage probability with different relative coherence times of the RF and FSO links. We also evaluate the effect of adaptive power allocation between the ARQ retransmissions on the system performance. The results show that joint implementation of the RF and FSO links leads to substantial performance improvement, compared to the cases with only the RF or the FSO link.