Performance analysis of FSO based inter-UAV communication systems

Abstract

Recently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) gained considerable attention for recent potential applications like 6G, internet of things, disaster management applications etc. Especially inter UAV communications have an increased interest in low, medium, and high altitude platforms. Free space optical (FSO) communication plays a vital role in UAV communication to offer a high data rate, wider bandwidth, and secure transmission. In this paper, first time we introduced heterodyne detection (HD) in FSO based inter UAV communication. The outage and average bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed system is analyzed and the results are compared with the existing Intensity modulation direct detection (IM/DD). We studied the impact of turbulence and pointing errors on BER and outage performance of the proposed system. The results are plotted for different system parameters such as Rytov Variance, field-Of-view, Transmitter UAV orientation ; receive UAV orientation, link range, and Beam width. The analytical results are validated with the monte-carlo simulations. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.