Performance Analysis of a Vertical FSO Link with Energy Harvesting Strategy

In this paper we investigate the application of free space optical (FSO) communications, energy harvesting, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as key technology enablers of a cost-efficient backhaul/fronthaul framework for 5G and beyond (5G+) networks. This novel approach is motivated by several facts. First, the UAVs, acting as relay nodes, represent an easy-to-deploy and adaptive network that can provide line-of-sight between the base stations and the gateways connected to the core network. Second, FSO communications offer high data rates between the UAVs and the network nodes, while avoiding any potential interference with the 5G radio access networks. Third, energy harvesting in the optical domain has the potential to extend the UAVs’ battery life. Nevertheless, the presence of atmospheric turbulence, atmospheric attenuation, and pointing errors in the FSO links severely degrades their performance. For this reason an accurate yet tractable modelling framework is required to fully understand whether an UAV-FSO backhaul/fronthaul network with energy harvesting can be applied. To this end, we consider a composite channel attenuation model that includes the effect of turbulence fading, pointing errors, and atmospheric attenuation. Using this model, we derive analytical closed-form expressions of the average harvested energy as a function of the FSO link parameters. These expressions can be used to improve energy harvesting efficiency in FSO link design. We have applied our proposed expressions to evaluate the energy harvested in vertical FSO links for a variety of real scenarios under a modified on-off keying (OOK) scheme optimized for energy harvesting. From the simulations carried out in this paper, we demonstrate that significant values of harvested energy can be obtained. Such performance enhancement can complement the existing deployment charging stations.