Outage Probability Analysis of Decode-and-Forward Based Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Relay Networks

This paper investigates the performance of a hybrid satellite–terrestrial cooperative relay network with the relay node equipped N antennas, where the satellite-destination and satellite-relay links follow the shadowed-Rician fading, and the relay-destination link undergoes the correlated Rayleigh fading. First, we derive the expression for probability density functions of signal-to-noise ratio in satellite-destination and satellite-relay links by applying maximum ratio combining protocol at the satellite, then the expression in relay-destination link is derived by employing the maximum ratio transmission at the relay. Next, we obtain the expression of outage probability of this system. Finally, the numerical results are given to validate the theoretical analysis, and we find that the performance of this system gets better with the increasing number of relay’s antennas.