Performance Analysis of Hybrid RF-Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Assisted FSO Communication

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the performance of a hybrid RF-FSO communication system assisted by optical reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, deriving closed-form expressions for outage probability and BER, and comparing it to traditional systems.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive performance analysis of ORIS-assisted RF-FSO systems, including closed-form solutions considering atmospheric and pointing errors, which is novel.

Findings

ORIS-assisted RF-FSO links perform slightly worse than traditional links.

Derived accurate closed-form outage probability and BER expressions.

System parameters significantly affect performance, as shown by simulations.

Abstract

Optical reconfigurable intelligent surface (ORIS) is an emerging technology that can achieve reconfigurable optical propagation environments by precisely adjusting signal's reflection and shape through a large number of passive reflecting elements. In this paper, we investigate the performance of an ORIS-assisted dual-hop hybrid radio frequency (RF) and free space optics (FSO) communication system. By jointly considering the physical models of ORIS, RF channel, atmospheric turbulence, and pointing error, the closed-form solutions of the system's precise outage probability, asymptotic outage probability and BER have been derived. It is shown through numerical results that the derivation results are accurate and the RF-FSO links with ORISs show a slightly worse performance than the traditional RF-FSO links. Based on theoretical analysis and simulation results, the system design and effect of each parameter have been discussed.