Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface for Mixed FSO-RF Systems with Co-Channel Interference

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is an emerging technology that can achieve reconfigurable radio propagation environments for beyond 5G/6G wireless systems by smartly tuning the signal reflection via a large number of low-cost passive reflecting elements. In this letter, we investigate the effect of co-channel interference (CCI) on RIS-based dual-hop mixed free-space optical (FSO)-radio frequency (RF) communication systems. The source node, equipped with multiple FSO apertures, transmits subcarrier intensity modulated symbols on the FSO link subjected to Gamma-Gamma (GG) distributed atmospheric turbulence with pointing errors (PEs). It is assumed that the relay-RIS and RIS-destination links follow Rayleigh distribution. The destination node is corrupted by multiple CCI (each following Rayleigh distribution). The performance of the considered system is evaluated by deriving novel closed-form expressions for the outage probability (OP) and bit error rate (BER). It is shown through numerical results that RIS-based dual-hop mixed FSO-RF system provide a significant performance enhancement in comparison to a traditional dual-hop mixed FSO-RF system even in presence of CCI.