Performance analysis of fixed gain relay-assisted vertical UWOC systems with generalized misalignment fading model

Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) as a potential underwater transmission technology has attracted increasing attention due to its high speed, low delay, and wide range of applications. In addition to absorption and scattering, ocean turbulence fading and misalignment fading seriously affect system performance. Thus, the relay assistance methods have been presented as an effective technique for fading mitigation in optical channels. In this paper, we propose a fixed gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relay-assisted vertical UWOC system with a generalized misalignment fading model over multi-layer cascaded gamma-gamma turbulence channels. For the relay-assisted system, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the probability density function (PDF) of the end-to-end instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are derived with the help of the Meijer-G function and the bivariate Fox-H function. Subsequently, based on these statistical analyses of SNR, we derive the closed-form expressions of the outage probability and ergodic capacity. Furthermore, we provide a very tight asymptotic expression for the outage probability in terms of simple functions under high SNR, and the diversity order is analyzed. Finally, results from Monte Carlo simulations are used to validate our derived results. Numerical results for different relay position deployments and alignment error levels reveal that the relay-assisted vertical UWOC system performs better when the relay node is located near the source, while the increase of alignment error level can damage the system performance. (c) 2024 Optica Publishing Group