On the Outage Performance of Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks in the 3D Poisson Field

Aiming to expand wireless coverage and connect the unconnected, space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGIN) have recently been proposed as a promising paradigm to satisfy the high-rate and high-reliability requirements. SAGIN is comprised by satellite, aerial, and terrestrial communication devices. In this article, from the perspective of cooperative communications, we regard the SAGIN as a two-hop relay network with the space-air and air-ground cooperative links. Especially, the location distribution of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), as known as the communication relay platforms in the SAGIN system, is modeled as a homogeneous Poisson Point Process (PPP) in a three-dimensional (3D) spherical field. We evaluate the outage performance of SAGIN in the 3D Poisson field and approximate its outage probability in closed form. In addition, the parametric study for the approximation technique used to derive the closed-form expression is also provided. Numerical results are presented and discussed to verify our outage performance analysis.