Combinatorics

Topology (electrical circuits)

Free-space optical communication

Hypergeometric function

Mathematics

Correctness

Bit error rate

Communications system

Algorithm

Statistics

Optical communication

Engineering

Mathematical analysis

Monte Carlo method

Electronic engineering

Computer science

Decoding methods

Telecommunications

IEEE Communications Letters

In this letter, we propose a dual-hop reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-based free space optical and radio frequency (FSO-RF) communication system, where an RIS is utilized to improve the coverage and system performance. Taking both the atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors into consideration, we derive exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and bit error rate (BER) in terms of the Meijer's G-function, generalized hypergeometric function, and Marcum Q-function. Furthermore, to obtain the diversity order, an asymptotic outage analysis is also obtained. Finally, the correctness of the analytical results is verified by Monte-Carlo simulation results.

Mixed Dual-Hop FSO-RF Communication Systems Through Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface