Abstract
In this paper, a cooperative multi-hop vehicle-to-vehicle communication over free-space optics (FSO) medium is examined, where unmanned aerial vehicles act as relay nodes. Outage performance of FSO cooperative system is analyzed by deriving the closed-form expressions, where atmospheric turbulence was defined by a generalized α-μ statistical model. Moreover, results on the bit error rate (BER) performance over various distributions are obtained. In addition, it is shown that the BER over Rayleigh fading outperforms the ones over Weibull and Nakagami fading channels when a two-relay FSO system is taken into consideration. Finally, it is presented that the BER with the detect-and-forward mode has better performance in contrast to the BER with amplify-and-forward mode when three and four hop scenarios are considered.