An Insight to the Outage Performance of Multi-Hop Mixed RF/FSO/UWOC System

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the outage performance of the three-hop mixed system integrating radio frequency (RF), free space optics (FSO), and under water optical communication (UWOC) system. The closed-form analytical expressions for the outage probability of the system are derived. In the considered system, the RF channel follows the Nakagami-m distribution, the FSO channel observes the Gamma-Gamma fading statistics, and the UWOC link experiences a mixture Exponential Generalized Gamma (EGG) fading distribution. To verify the derived analytical expressions, numerical simulations are also carried out, and we present the influence of the various link parameters such as path loss, atmospheric turbulence, pointing errors, angle-of-arrival fluctuations, water salinity, and scintillation on the performance of the decode and forward (DF) relayed multi-hop communication system.