Performance Analysis of a UAV-Assisted RF/FSO Relaying Systems for Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV), as a development and complement of the Internet of Thing, has attracted extensive attention and is expected to play a crucial role in human society with the matured Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks (SAGIN). Here, we devote ourselves to establish and investigate a UAV-assisted radio frequency (RF)/free space optical (FSO) communication system under the amplified-and-forward protocol with variable gain. More specifically, we assume the RF link follows κ-μ fading and the FSO link experiences Malaga fading, which can characterize the atmospheric turbulence under weak-to-strong condition excellently. In addition, both the pointing errors impairment and the detection techniques for the FSO link are also taken into account. Novel analytical expressions for the end-to-end system, e.g., the cumulative distribution function, probability density function, and moment generating function, are proposed. By capitalizing on these results, some system metrics of the UAV-assisted relaying system are given with the Meijer’s G function. To providing more insights for this UAV-assisted system for SAGIN, high signal-to-noise approximations of these metrics are also presented. Furthermore, the approximated expressions for the outage probability and average BER are given in presence of non-pointing error effect. Finally, all these analytical results are validated with the Monte-Carlo simulations.