Performance Analysis of Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted-FSO System over Turbulent Channels with Pointing Errors

In free space optics (FSO) communication, one of the main challenges consists in ensuring a line of sight (LOS) link between the transmitter and the receiver. To overcome this stringent requirement, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are considered as a promising solution to provide more controllable links and increase communication coverage. In this paper, we investigate the performance of an IRS-assisted FSO system considering the most degrading factors, including atmospheric turbulence and pointing error induced fading due to both the transmitter jitter and the IRS jitter angles. A closed-form expression of outage probability has been derived. Based on the obtained results, it is shown that the system performance depends on the placement of the IRS and the atmospheric turbulence. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to determine the optimal link distance depending on the placement of the IRS.