Abstract
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted free-space optical communication (FSO) system has recently played a significant role in increasing optical wireless connectivity across several hovering UAV nodes while minimizing overall infrastructure costs. However, atmospheric turbulence-induced fading, geometric loss, and pointing errors (PEs) have a major negative impact on the received signal quality at the hovering FSO platform. This research paper provides a more reliable and simple architecture between the ground station terminal and a hovering UAV platform to alleviate these channel limitations, especially misalignment issues. The optical terminal is designed by selecting the optimal values for the receiver aperture diameter, beam waist size, angle of arrival (AoA), and, avalanche photo detector (APD) receiver gain. The system incorporates a direct detection scheme and an APD receiver structure to combat the combined effects of atmospheric turbulence and the hovering UAV. Moreover, the average symbol error rate (SER), and ergodic capacity are derived considering the combined G2U and U2G links for the four different losses: link loss, atmospheric turbulence considering generalized Malaga distribution, PEs and AOA, respectively. The proposed system performance is investigated for a link length of 0.250 km under weak to strong turbulence conditions. The result clearly depicts the best SER performance for an APD gain range of 14 \(\le G\le\) 24, to mitigate the UAV's fluctuations, and the optimum AoA range between 5 \(\le {\theta }_{FoV}\le\) 10 mrad for \({\sigma }_{a}\)= 3.8 mrad, 7.6 mrad, and 8.5 mrad respectively.
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The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Sinha, S., Kumar, C. Performance evaluation of UAV-assisted FSO link in generalized Malaga distributed atmospheric turbulence conditions. Opt Quant Electron 55, 1161 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11082-023-05417-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11082-023-05417-0