Performance analysis of a dual-hop satellite relay network with hardware impairments

The hardware impairments of physical transceivers that create distortions degrade the performance of satellite relay communication. In this paper, we investigate the impact of hardware impairments on both the outage performance and the instantaneous capacity of dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) satellite-relay network. Specifically, the exact closed-form expression for the outage probability of the system and the analytical expression for the instantaneous capacity of the system are derived over shadowed Rician fading channel, which provide fast means to evaluate the impact of hardware impairments. Moreover, the results reveal that the outage floor and the capacity upper bound appear when the hardware impairments exist. In addition, simulation results are given to show the correctness of the analytical results.