Outage Probability Estimation for a Multi-hop Terrestrial FSO Link Simplified to a Dual-hop Scheme.

The last years, FSO technology has demonstrated an increasing scientific and commercial interest. However, due the signal’s propagation through the atmosphere, the operation of FSO links depends strongly on the weather conditions and mostly by atmospheric turbulence effect. A common way for the maximization of the effective radius of FSO systems operating through the atmosphere is the employment of DF relays. However, by employing multiple relays and depending on the adopted fading model for turbulence, the complexity of the expressions used for the performance estimation of such systems can be significant increased. Motivated by the latter, in this work we minimize the mathematical complexity of these expressions by emulating the multi-hop system as dual-hop and by using an approximation for the turbulence-induced fading.