Performance Analysis of Multi-Antenna Multiuser Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Relay Systems for Mobile Services Delivery

Satellite communication systems need to be integrated with emerging cooperative relaying techniques to provide seamless connectivity and high-speed broadband access for mobile users in future wireless networks. In this paper, we study a multi-antenna multiuser hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay network (HSTRN) employing opportunistic user scheduling with outdated channel state information (CSI) and amplify-and-forward relaying with co-channel interference (CCI). By adopting Shadowed-Rician fading for satellite links and Nakagami-m fading for terrestrial links, we derive novel and accurate expressions for outage probability and ergodic capacity of the proposed HSTRN, and further examine its achievable diversity order. More importantly, we conduct the performance analysis by taking both uncorrelated and correlated Shadowed-Rician fading channels into account and show that the antenna correlation at the satellite does not affect the overall system diversity order. Our derived analytical expressions provide efficient tools to characterize the impact of CCI, outdated CSI, and antenna correlation on the system performance of HSTRN with an arbitrary number of satellite antennas, number of interferers, number of users, and integer values of the per-hop fading severity parameters. Our results provide useful guidelines in the design of futuristic HSTRNs for satellite mobile communications.