Outage Performance of Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Multi-Antenna Relay Networks

This paper investigates the outage performance of an integrated satellite-terrestrial relay network (ISTRN), where the satellite links and the terrestrial links are assumed to experience Shadowed-Rician (SR) fading and Rayleigh fading, respectively. Here, the multi-antenna terrestrial relay with decode-and-forward (DF) protocol is adopted to assist the signal transmission from a satellite to a terrestrial destination. By supposing that the destination exploits the maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme when the relay can decode the satellite signal successfully, we derive the closed-form expression of the outage probability (OP) for the considered ISTRN. Computer simulation results are provided to corroborate the analytical results and show the impact of the multi-antenna on the system.