Table 1.
Representative UAV-assisted optical/hybrid studies and modeling gaps.
Fig 1.
Hybrid FSO/VLC UAV relay architecture integrating narrow-beam FSO uplinks and LED-based VLC downlinks with dynamic link adaptation.
Fig 2.
System model of a UAV-assisted hybrid optical link: a narrow-beam FSO uplink connects the ground terminal to the UAV, while a wide-aperture VLC downlink serves ground users.
Table 2.
Simulation parameters.
Fig 3.
FSO received power versus link distance for varying visibility conditions (different extinction coefficients κ).
Fig 4.
FSO bit-error rate (BER) versus link distance under different turbulence strengths (C2n).
Fig 5.
Line-of-sight (LoS) alignment probability versus RMS pointing jitter, for multiple receiver capture half-angles Θc.
Fig 6.
VLC SNR versus receiver field of view (FOV): (a) impact of altitude; (b) nominal operating altitude.
Fig 7.
VLC SNR heatmap over the ground footprint at the nominal altitude and LED semi-angle at half-power.
Fig 8.
FSO BER versus beam divergence angle for a fixed range/channel/noise setting (illustrating divergence-driven misalignment trade-offs).
Table 3.
Baseline systems used for comparative evaluation.
Table 4.
Minimal benchmark check versus standard published baseline models: FSO with pointing errors [41,45] and Lambertian VLC [1,46].
Table 5.
Sensitivity study settings.
Table 6.
Recommended parameter settings for robust hybrid FSO/VLC relay.