Performance Analysis of Dual-Hop Mixed Power Line Communication/Free-Space Optical Cooperative Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we study a mixed cooperative communication system consisting of power line communication (PLC) and free-space optical communication (FSO) links, where the PLC link suffers from log-normal fading and is affected by both impulsive and background noises. Meanwhile, the FSO link undergoes Gamma-Gamma fading with both atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors. More specifically, we present closed-form expressions for the probability density function and the cumulative distribution function of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio of the proposed model. Consequently, the outage probability and the bit error rate (BER) performance are derived in terms of univariate Fox-H and bivariate Fox-H functions. Finally, the analytical results are verified using Monte Carlo simulations, providing useful insights into the capabilities of the proposed system.