Comprehensive Channel Modeling of UAV-Assisted FSO Systems under Fog, AoA Fluctuations, and Pointing Errors
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4108/airo.13538Keywords:
Free-space optical (FSO) communication, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relaying, optical channel modeling, fog attenuation, pointing errors, angle-of-arrival fluctuations, outage analysisAbstract
This paper investigates the outage performance of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted free-space optical (FSO) communication systems operating in foggy channels. The analysis jointly accounts for atmospheric turbulence, fog-induced attenuation, generalized Beckmann-distributed pointing errors (PE), and angle-of-arrival (AoA) fluctuations caused by UAV orientation jitter. A comprehensive statistical channel model is developed, from which closed-form expressions for outage probability and an analytical characterization of outage capacity are derived. The effects of receiver field-of-view (FoV) limitations and multi-UAV amplify-and-forward relaying on link reliability are also investigated. Numerical results validate the proposed analysis and reveal that AoA fluctuations impose a fundamental performance limit, resulting in an outage floor, particularly under dense fog and narrow-FoV conditions. These findings provide practical design insights for improving the reliability of UAV-assisted FSO communication systems in adverse weather environments.
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