Outage Performance of Satellite-Aerial-Terrestrial Network

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the performance of an amplify-and-forward satellite-aerial-terrestrial network (SATN) with a multi-antenna unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay, where the satellite-UAV link undergoes correlated Shadowed-Rician fading while the UAV-terrestrial links experience correlated Rician fading, respectively. Specifically, we first formulate a constrained optimization problem in terms of maximizing the system capacity to obtain the beamforming (BF) weight vectors at the UAV. By assuming that perfect channel state information (CSI) is unavailable, we design statistical CSI-aided BF scheme to enhance the system performance. Then, with the help of probability theory, we obtain the closed-form expression of outage probability for the considered SATN. Simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed BF scheme and the correctness of the derived expressions.