Abstract
Free-space optical (FSO) communication is considered to be a potential solution to congestion in the radio-frequency spectrum and last-mile-access bottleneck issues in future cellular communication networks, such as 5G and beyond. However, FSO link performance may degrade significantly due to irradiance fluctuations and random temporal fluctuations from atmospheric turbulence. Therefore, in this work the main objective is to reduce the effect of the atmospheric turbulence by considering a multihop FSO communication system with amplify-and-forward relaying supported by a radio-frequency (RF) link, which form a hybrid FSO/RF communication system. The FSO link is assumed to follow the gamma-gamma fading model, which represents strong turbulence. Also, the RF link is modeled by a Rayleigh distribution. The performance of the considered system, in terms of the outage probability and average bit-error rate (BER), is investigated and analyzed under various weather conditions and pointing errors. Furthermore, the effect of the number of employed relay nodes on the performance of the system is investigated. The results indicate that the considered system reduces outage probability and average BER significantly, especially for low channel quality. Finally, the closed-form expressions derived in this work are compared to the results of Monte Carlo simulations, for verification.