  Recent studies have shown that satellite communication (SatCom) will have a
fundamental role in the next generation non-terrestrial networks (NTN). In
SatCom, radio-frequency (RF) or free-space optical (FSO) communications can be
used depending on the communication environment. Motivated by the complementary
nature of RF and FSO communication, we propose a hybrid RF/FSO transmission
strategy for SatCom, where the satellite selects RF or FSO links depending on
the weather conditions obtained from the context-aware sensor. To quantify the
performance of the proposed network, we derive the outage probability
expressions by considering different weather conditions. Moreover, asymptotic
analysis is conducted to obtain the diversity order. Furthermore, we
investigate the impact of non-zero boresight pointing errors and illustrate the
benefits of the aperture averaging to mitigate the effect of misalignment and
atmospheric turbulence. Finally, we suggest effective design guidelines that
can be useful for system designers. The results have shown that the proposed
strategy performs better than the dual-mode conventional hybrid RF/FSO
communication in terms of outage probability offering some power gain.
