Performance Analysis of Dual-Hop Wireless Systems Over Mixed FSO/RF Fading Channel

This paper investigates the performance of a dual-hop mixed free-space optical (FSO)/radio frequency (RF) system. To this end, the FSO link is subject to the Gamma-Gamma distribution effects that account for pointing error impairments and under both heterodyne detection and intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) methods, while the RF link undergoes the $\alpha $ - $\mathcal {F}$ distribution fading. For amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying, we derived the closed-form expressions of various important performance metrics by using bivariate Fox’s $H$ -functions, such as the average bit-error rate (BER), end-to-end outage probability (OP), effective capacity, and ergodic capacity. We unveil the effects of system and channel parameters on performance. Furthermore, we provide an asymptotical analysis to discuss significant diversity gains. Note that our results include previous works as special cases, which provides a framework. Finally, our derived expressions have confirmed the correctness via exactly matching Monte Carlo simulation results.