Enhancing FSO Communication Performance with UAV Technologies

Abstract

Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into a relay-based free space optical (FSO) communication system has several blessings that incorporate dealing with turbulence-induced atmospheric scintillation due to their flexible mobility. This study extensively assesses a UAV-FSO system that is based on a decode-and-forward dual-hop strategy with multiple transmission sources. Through the incorporation of the Gamma-Gamma (GG) distribution to measure factors such as atmospheric losses, atmospheric turbulence, angle-of-arrival fluctuations, and pointing errors, a faithful formula for the probability density function (PDF) of the total channel gain is derived.  A mathematical representation for the average bit error rate (BER) of the system is also derived and later on, validated through extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The simulation outcomes spotlight model robustness across a range of operational conditions. These results underline the enhanced efficiency and versatility of the UAV-assisted FSO systems that can manage various data sources, and consequently, they can be quite applicable in the case of surveillance and mobile network communications.