Performance analysis of multi-satellite hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay networks

In this paper, the performance of a multi-satellite hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay network (HSTRN) is investigated, where a relay is adopted using either amplify-and-forward (AF) or decode-and-forward (DF) protocol to assist the transmission, considering Shadowed-Rician fading for satellites links and Rayleigh fading for terrestrial link. To evaluate the performance of the considered network, the accurate analytical expression for the outage probability (OP) is derived. In order to get further insights into the achievable diversity order of the system, the asymptotic behaviour of OP expression at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime is deduced. The throughput of the system is also discussed to evaluate the network performance. Finally, the theoretical results are validated through comparison with simulations and show: (1) The performance of the considered network gets better with the increase of the satellite number and with the decreasing severity of the channel fading scenario. (2) The performance of the DF relaying system is better than AF at low SNR region, while they will get increasingly consistent at high SNR region.