A Weather-Dependent Hybrid RF/FSO Satellite Communication for Improved Power Efficiency

TL;DR

This paper proposes a weather-aware hybrid RF/FSO satellite communication system that dynamically switches links to improve power efficiency and reliability, supported by analytical performance evaluation and design guidelines.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive hybrid RF/FSO strategy for SatCom that considers weather conditions, with analytical outage probability derivations and insights into mitigating misalignment effects.

Findings

Outage probability is reduced with the proposed strategy.

Power efficiency is improved compared to conventional dual-mode systems.

Aperture averaging helps mitigate atmospheric turbulence effects.

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that satellite communication (SatCom) will have a fundamental role in the next generation non-terrestrial networks (NTN). In SatCom, radio-frequency (RF) or free-space optical (FSO) communications can be used depending on the communication environment. Motivated by the complementary nature of RF and FSO communication, we propose a hybrid RF/FSO transmission strategy for SatCom, where the satellite selects RF or FSO links depending on the weather conditions obtained from the context-aware sensor. To quantify the performance of the proposed network, we derive the outage probability expressions by considering different weather conditions. Moreover, asymptotic analysis is conducted to obtain the diversity order. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of non-zero boresight pointing errors and illustrate the benefits of the aperture averaging to mitigate the effect of misalignment and atmospheric turbulence. Finally, we suggest effective design guidelines that can be useful for system designers. The results have shown that the proposed strategy performs better than the dual-mode conventional hybrid RF/FSO communication in terms of outage probability offering some power gain.