IRS-Assisted UAV Based FSO System: Modeling Approach for Hovering UAV

This work aims to present a modeling approach for an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based free-space optical (FSO) communication system emphasizing hovering of UAV. The hovering of UAV is accounted for at both the IRS and receiver (Rx) nodes. Because of the highly line-of-sight (LOS) nature of the FSO communication, the hovering of UAV significantly impacts the system performance. Therefore, a hovering UAV-enabled-IRS (UIRS) based FSO model is proposed. For the first time, we statistically model the impact of UAV hovering at both the IRS and the Rx nodes by proposing distribution functions accounting angle-of-arrival (AoA) fluctuations. Moreover, to account for realistic findings, we incorporate independent fading statistics between the transmitter (laser source)-UIRS link and UIRS-Rx (photodetector) link. Further, we analyze the performance of the proposed UIRS-FSO model considering bit error rate as the metric. Our findings reveal that the UIRS-FSO system is highly impacted when accounting for the AoA fluctuations at both the IRS and Rx nodes.