Performance Analysis of Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Cooperative Systems with Fixed Gain Relaying

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a hybrid satellite-terrestrial cooperative relay system, where both of the source-relay and source-destination links experience independent non-identical shadowed-Rician fading while the relay-destination link undergoes uncorrelated Rayleigh fading. By employing maximal-ratio-combining at the destination to combine the signals from the direct link and the fixed-gain relay links, we first obtain the analytical expression for the moment generating function (MGF) of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Then, with the help of the obtained MGF, we derive the theoretical formulas for the ergodic capacity and average symbol error rate of the considered system. Moreover, the asymptotic analysis at high SNR is also presented to reveal the diversity order and array gain of the system. Finally, the effectiveness of the analytical results is verified through comparison with Monte Carlo simulations.