Optical Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces Empowering Non-Terrestrial Communications

Abstract: In this work, we propose an innovative system that combines high-altitude platforms (HAPs) and optical intelligent reflecting surfaces (OIRS) to address line-of-sight (LOS) challenges in urban environments. Our three-hops system setup includes an optical ground station (OGS), a HAP, an OIRS, and a user. Signals are transmitted from the OGS to the HAP via a free space optical (FSO) link, with the HAP functioning as an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay that redirects signals through an OIRS, effectively bypassing obstacles such as buildings and trees to improve connectivity for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) User. For the OIRS link, we address key channel impairments, including atmospheric turbulence, pointing errors, attenuation, and geometric and misalignment losses (GML). An accurate approximation for the Hoyt-distributed GML model is derived, enabling us to obtain closed-form expressions for outage probability (OP) and various performance metrics, such as average bit error rate (BER) and channel capacity of the OIRS-assisted FSO link. Furthermore, we analyze the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and derive closed-form expressions for OP and performance metrics. Asymptotic expressions are provided for high-SNR regimes, allowing the system's diversity order to be calculated.