Mixed Dual-Hop FSO-RF Communication Systems Through Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

In this letter, we propose a dual-hop reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-based free space optical and radio frequency (FSO-RF) communication system, where an RIS is utilized to improve the coverage and system performance. Taking both the atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors into consideration, we derive exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and bit error rate (BER) in terms of the Meijer’s G-function, generalized hypergeometric function, and Marcum Q-function. Furthermore, to obtain the diversity order, an asymptotic outage analysis is also obtained. Finally, the correctness of the analytical results is verified by Monte-Carlo simulation results.