Cascaded Rf-Fso-Vlc System using Df Relays

This paper presents performance analysis of cascaded radio frequency-free space optical communication-visible light communication (RF-FSO-VLC) system. The proposed model comprises of the RF link as the core network, a terrestrial optical link for providing last mile connectivity with the indoor cell users communicating through VLC environment. The RF link undergoes Nakagami-m distributed fading, while the terrestrial optical link is modeled by Double Generalized Gamma (DGG) distributed turbulence and Rayleigh-distributed misalignment losses. VLC links are characterized by the randomness in users’ position. Using statistical properties of system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), outage and error performance of the proposed system is evaluated depending on whether the relays and the destination decode either perfectly or erroneously. The numerical results show that the system performance varies depending on field-of view (FOV) of the detector and user’s position. This is because as FOV increases along with the height of the LED, the outage probability of the system increases. Error probability depends on the type of detection techniques, where a heterodyne detection system performs better than a direct detection system. Moreover, through results it is inferred that severe fading and misalignment losses result in poor error performance of the considered system errors on the performance of the considered cooperative system.