Recently, a combination of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and free-space optics (FSO) has been investigated as a potential method for high data-rate front-haul communication links. The aim of this work was to address the performance of UAV-to-ground station-based FSO communications in terms of the symbol error rate (SER). The system proposes utilizing subcarrier intensity modulation and an avalanche photo-diode (APD) to combat the joint effects of atmospheric turbulence conditions and pointing error due to the UAV’s fluctuations. In the proposed system model, the FSO transmitter (Tx) is mounted on the UAV flying over the monitoring area, whereas the FSO receiver (Rx) is placed on either the ground or top of a high building. Unlike previous works related to this topic, we considered combined channel parameters that affect the system performance such as transmitted power, link loss, various atmospheric turbulence conditions, pointing error loss, and the total noise at the APD receiver. Numerical results have shown that, for the best system SER performance, the value of an average APD gain at the Rx can be selected, varying from 18 to 30, whereas the equivalent beam waist radius at the Tx should be in a range from 2 to 2.2 cm in order to decrease the effects from the UAV’s fluctuations.

In this work, we analyse pointing error effects on the performance of amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) free-space optical (FSO) communication system employing sub-carrier quadrature amplitude modulation (SC-QAM) signal over log-normal and gamma-gamma distributed atmospheric turbulence channels. We study the pointing error effects by taking into account the influence of beam-width, aperture size and jitter variance on the average symbol error rate (ASER), which is derived in closed-form expressions of MIMO/FSO and SISO/FSO systems. In addition, the number of relaying stations is taken into account in the statistical model of the combined channel including atmospheric loss, atmospheric turbulence and pointing error impairments. The numerical results show that by combining AF relaying stations and MIMO/FSO configurations, the link length can be extended because the transmitted power is reduced according to the amplifier gain. Moreover, the performance of AF relaying MIMO/FSO systems is better than that of AF relaying SISO/FSO systems at the same link length.

We theoretically analyze the performance of free-space optical (FSO) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems using rectangular sub-carrier quadrature modulation (SC-QAM) signaling. The systems's average symbol-error rate (ASER) is derived taking into account the atmospheric turbulence effects on the FSO MIMO channel, which is modeled by lognormal and the gamma-gamma processes for the cases of weak-to-strong turbulence conditions. We quantitatively discuss the influence of turbulence strength, link distance and different MIMO configurations on the ASER. We also derive and discuss the FSO MIMO average (ergodic) channel capacity (ACC), which is expressed in terms of average spectral efficiency (ASE), under the impact of various channel conditions.