Relay Selection in Relay-Assisted Free Space Optical Systems

We investigate transmission protocols for relay-assisted free-space optical (FSO) systems, when multiple parallel relays are employed and there is no direct link between the source and the destination. As an alternative to all-active FSO relaying, where all the available relays transmit jointly, we propose a scheme which selects only a single relay to participate in the communication between the source and the destination in each transmission slot, based on the channel state information (CSI) obtained from all FSO links. Thus, the need for synchronizing the relays´ transmission is avoided, while the slowly varying nature of the atmospheric channel is exploited. For both relay selection and all-active relaying, novel analytical closed-form expressions for their outage performance are derived, assuming the Gamma-Gamma channel model. Numerical results are provided for equal and non-equal length FSO links, which clearly demonstrate the significant performance gains offered by relay selection compared to all-active relaying.