On the Performance of RIS-Assisted Dual-Hop Mixed RF-UWOC Systems

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can enhance the performance of dual-hop mixed RF-UWOC systems, providing analytical expressions and insights into outage probability, error rates, and capacity.

Contribution

It introduces analytical models for RIS-assisted RF-UWOC systems, including outage probability, ABER, and capacity, with asymptotic analysis and diversity order derivation.

Findings

RIS improves system performance significantly.

Diversity order depends on RF link parameters.

Analytical expressions match simulation results.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted dual-hop mixed radio-frequency underwater wireless optical communication (RF-UWOC) system. An RIS is an emerging and low-cost technology that aims to enhance the strength of the received signal, thus improving the system performance. In the considered system setup, a ground source does not have a reliable direct link to a given marine buoy and communicates with it through an RIS installed on a building. In particular, the buoy acts as a relay that sends the signal to an underwater destination. In this context, analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP), average bit error rate (ABER), and average channel capacity (ACC) are derived assuming fixed-gain amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying protocols at the marine buoy. Moreover, asymptotic analyses of the OP and ABER are carried out in order to gain further insights from the analytical frameworks. In particular, the system diversity order is derived and it is shown to depend on the RF link parameters and on the detection schemes of the UWOC link. Finally, it is demonstrated that RIS-assisted systems can effectively improve the performance of mixed dual-hop RF-UWOC systems.