Free-Space Optical Communication With Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Abstract: Despite the promising gains, free-space optical (FSO) communication is severely influenced by atmospheric turbulence and pointing error issues, which make its practical design a bit challenging. In this paper, with the aim to increase the communication coverage and improve the system performance, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are considered in an FSO communication setup, in which both atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors are considered. Closed-form expressions for the outage probability, average bit error rate, and channel capacity are derived assuming large number of reflecting elements at the RIS. Specifically, according to central limit theorem (CLT), while assuming multiple reflecting elements approximate expressions are proposed. It is shown that the respective accuracies increase as the number of elements at the RIS increases. Illustrative numerical examples are shown along with insightful discussions. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are presented to verify the correctness of the analytical results.