Outage probability analysis in multi-user FSO/RF and UAV-enabled MIMO communication networks

Abstract This paper considers a mixed free-space optical/radio frequency (FSO/RF) system, which facilitates the communication between a ground central unit (CU) and multiple ground users (GUs) via a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acting as a decode-and-forward (DF) aerial relay. It is considered that the CU employs multiple transmit apertures and is interconnected with the aerial relay via an FSO link with transmit aperture selection (TAS), whereas the relay communicates with the GUs over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) RF links with orthogonal space–time block coding (OSTBC) transmission. It is assumed that the optical channels are mainly affected by atmospheric attenuation as well as geometric and misalignment loss (GML). Besides, the atmospheric turbulence is assumed weak for short-range links. Also, fully correlated shadowed conditions are considered in the RF links and the MIMO channels are modeled using the Nakagami/Inverse Gamma (IG) composite fading distribution. Opportunistic GU scheduling is applied in the downlink and novel closed-form mathematical formulas for the outage probability (OP) are derived. The results demonstrate the theoretical derivations and the performance benefits of the proposed approach.