Performance analysis of RF-FSO communication systems over the Málaga distribution channel with pointing error

Abstract Free Space Optical (FSO) communication systems are used for high speed, secure and cheaper optical connectivity between users. It can transport the data from a suitable relay which is multiplexing many RF users and forming a high bandwidth data. These kind of networks are known as dual hop and asymmetric RF-FSO links. In this work, such an RF-FSO cooperative system is studied which is based on the Decode-Forward (DF) relaying method. For the analysis, the generalized channel models are considered such that the existing results can be expressed under more generic performance expressions. The outage probability is initially derived for this system and subsequently the average bit error rate (ABER) is derived using it. The cooperative diversity performance is also investigated by deriving the asymptotic expressions for these metrics at high received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).