A Weather-Dependent Hybrid RF/FSO Satellite Communication for Improved Power Efficiency

Recent studies have shown that satellite communication (SatCom) will have a fundamental role in the next generation non-terrestrial networks (NTN). In SatCom, radio-frequency (RF) or free-space optical (FSO) communications can be used depending on the communication environment. Motivated by the complementary nature of RF and FSO communication, we propose a hybrid RF/FSO transmission strategy for SatCom, where the satellite selects RF or FSO link depending on the weather conditions obtained from the context-aware sensor. To quantify the performance of the proposed network, we derive the outage probability by considering different weather conditions. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of non-zero boresight pointing errors and illustrate the benefits of the aperture averaging to mitigate the effect of misalignment. Finally, we suggest effective design guidelines that can be useful for system designers. The results have shown that the proposed strategy performs better than the dual-mode conventional hybrid RF/FSO communication in terms of outage probability, offering almost 5 dB gain.