All-Optical Amplify-and-Forward Relaying System for Atmospheric Channels

In this letter, we investigate the performance of a dual-hop free space optical link with an all-optical amplify-and-forward relay. We employ photon counting methodology and derive closed form expressions for the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio and the outage probability. In our derivations, we consider either full or partial channel state information (CSI) at the relay and take into account practical limitations such as amplifier noise and filtering effects. Our results indicate significant performance improvements over direct transmission and furthermore demonstrate that semi-blind relaying (which depends only on statistical CSI) provides nearly identical performance to its full-CSI counterpart.