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This paper investigates and enhances unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay-assisted free-space optics (FSO) optical wireless communication (OWC) systems under the effects of pointing errors (PEs) and atmospheric turbulences (ATs). The incorporation of UAVs as buffer-aided moving relays in the conventional FSO (CFSO) relay-assisted systems is proposed for enhancing the performance of PEs through AT. Using M-PSK (phase shift keying) and M-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation), the impact of PEs on transmission quality is evaluated in this work. We evaluate and optimize the symbol error rate, outage probability (OP), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the UAV-to-ground station-based FSO communications systems. The spatial diversity-based relay-assisted CFSO systems can enhance the performance of the UAV-UAV FSO links. In this paper, a new FSO (NFSO) channel model for the hovering UAV-FSO OWC fluctuations under the PEs, AT effects, jitter, deviation, receiving an error, and wind resistance effects are established. To improve the performance of hovering UAV-based FSO relay OWC systems. We reduce the influence of UAV-FSO OWC fluctuations under PEs and AT effects. By receiving incoherent signals at various locations, the spatial diversity-based relay-assisted NFSO systems can significantly increase the system's redundancy and enhance connection stability. Numerical results show that to achieve a bit-error-rate (BER) of $$\le 10^{ - 5}$$ ≤ 10 - 5 , the required SNR is ≥ 23 dB when the wind variance of the UAVs $$\sigma_{\alpha }^{2}$$ σ α 2 increases from 0 to 7 mrad with FSO link distance L = 2000 m. The required SNR is ≥ 25 dB when the wind variance $$\sigma_{\alpha }^{2}$$ σ α 2 is 1 mrad at an OP of $$10^{ - 6}$$ 10 - 6 . To obtain an average BER of $$10^{ - 6}$$ 10 - 6 , the SNR should be 16.23 dB, 17.64 dB, and 21.45 dB when $$\sigma_{\alpha }^{2}$$ σ α 2 is 0 mrad, 1 mrad, and 2 mrad, respectively. Using 8-PSK modulation without PEs requires 23.5 dB at BER of $$10^{ - 8}$$ 10 - 8 while 16-QAM without PEs requires 26.5 dB to maintain the same BER of $$10^{ - 8}$$ 10 - 8 . Compared with 16-QAM without PEs, the SNR gain of 8-PSK without PEs is 3 dB. The results show the relay-assisted UAV-FSO system with five stationary relays can achieve BER $$10^{ - 8}$$ 10 - 8 at 25 dB SNR in the ideal case and $$10^{ - 5}$$ 10 - 5 at 27 dB SNR with AT and PE at FSO length 1000 m. The results show the relay UAV-FSO system outperforms the CFSO at the BER and SNR performance. The effects of UAV’FSO s fluctuation increase when the UAV-FSO link length, $${\text{L}}_{{{\text{fso}}}}$$ L fso increases. The results of the weak turbulence achieve better SER compared with MT and ST. The obtained results show that decreasing $${\text{L}}_{{{\text{fso}}}}$$ L fso can compensate for the effects of UAV-FSO link fluctuation on the proposed system. Finally, we investigated the CFSO relay-assisted UAV-FSO system with aided NFSO-UAVs spatial diversity-based relay-based on NFSO OWC and revealed the benefits of the resulting hybrid architecture.

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