Performance Analysis of ARQ-based RF-FSO Links

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the performance of hybrid RF-FSO communication links using ARQ, deriving key performance metrics and demonstrating significant improvements through joint implementation and adaptive power allocation.

Contribution

It provides closed-form expressions for decoding probabilities, throughput, and outage, and evaluates the impact of adaptive power allocation on hybrid RF-FSO systems.

Findings

Joint RF-FSO links outperform single-link systems.

Adaptive power allocation enhances system performance.

Derived closed-form expressions for key metrics.

Abstract

In this letter, we study the performance of hybrid radio-frequency (RF) and free-space optical (FSO) links using automatic repeat request (ARQ). We derive closed-form expressions for the message decoding probabilities, throughput, and outage probability with different relative coherence times of the RF and FSO links. We also evaluate the effect of adaptive power allocation between the ARQ retransmissions on the system performance. The results show that joint implementation of the RF and FSO links leads to substantial performance improvement, compared to the cases with only the RF or the FSO link.