SLIPT-Enabled Ground-to-UAV FSO Systems with Optical Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Abstract

This paper proposes an optical reconfigurable intelligent surface (ORIS)-assisted ground-to-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) free-space optical (FSO) communication system empowered by simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (SLIPT). To overcome the line-of-sight (LoS) limitation of FSO-based SLIPT systems, we introduce an ORIS that reflects the laser beam towards a non-LoS UAV receiver. We model and analyze the combined channel characteristics, incorporating atmospheric loss, turbulence-induced fading, pointing error, and angle-of-arrival fluctuations due to UAV hovering. We derive closed-form expressions for harvested energy, outage probability, and symbol error rate (SER). Numerical results show that integrating ORIS improves EH efficiency while maintaining manageable outage and SER performance.