Joint relay selection and link scheduling in cooperative free-space optical system

Abstract. Free-space optical (FSO) communication system is vulnerable to link disruption due to the propagation loss and atmospheric turbulence. Cooperative FSO system has been proposed to mitigate the adverse effects of link disruption by the cooperative transmission in assistance of relay. However, most of the related works focus on the outage probability analysis and put less attention on the resource utilization. In fact, there exists a waste of bandwidth resource due to time slot waiting and more FSO transceivers are occupied. We mainly focus on the relay selection and link scheduling mechanisms of cooperative FSO system to improve not only network reliability but also resource utilization. We first propose a relay selection algorithm as a solution to combat channel fading. In the relay selection algorithm, two cooperative modes including intrarelay-set and inter-relay-set cooperative modes are proposed to enhance network capacity. Then, a link scheduling algorithm is further proposed to improve the bandwidth utilization and reduce the occupancy rate of transceivers by utilizing more sufficiently the idle FSO links. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can provide significant performance gain for cooperative FSO system in reliability and resource utilization and are highly suitable for the growing traffic demands.