Ergodic capacity analysis for DF strategies in cooperative FSO systems

This paper focuses on the ergodic capacity analysis in the context of cooperative free-space optical (FSO) systems when the line of sight is available. Novel asymptotic closed-form expressions for the ergodic capacity corresponding to two different decode-and-forward (DF) strategies are obtained for a cooperative FSO communication system. Here, the atmospheric turbulence is modeled by a gamma-gamma distribution of parameters α and β which allows to study a wide range of turbulence conditions (moderate-to-strong) as well as the effect of the misalignment with zero boresight. It is demonstrated that cooperative communications are able to achieve not only a better performance in terms of the error rate performance as well as outage probability than direct transmission, but also in terms of the channel capacity in the context of FSO systems without much increase in hardware. In this way, a 3-way FSO communication setup is considered, in which the cooperative protocol can be applied to achieve a greater ergodic capacity compared to a direct transmission. It can be concluded that a greater and robust capacity strongly dependent on the relay location is achieved compared to a direct transmission without cooperative communication when line of sight is available. Here, the line of sight is taken into account in order to achieve a significant robustness under different turbulence conditions and more severe pointing errors regardless of the relay location. Simulation results are further demonstrated to confirm the accuracy and usefulness of the derived results.