Analysis of the Outage Probability of Ground-Based Relaying for Satellite Systems

This paper investigates the theoretical basis for using ground relaying in multi-antenna satellites exposed to blocking situations. Inactive and unobstructed User Equipments (UEs) located on the ground are the relaying nodes of UEs that are not in the satellite’s field of view. Exact closed-form relationships of the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and the outage probability are obtained for the case where each user is connected to two transmitting antennas at the satellite. The channel between the satellite and ground is modeled as a shadowed-Rician (SR), whereas a Fluctuating Two-Ray (FTR) fading model is used for the mmWaves ground link between relay and UE, as well as cases with perfect and imperfect Channel State Information (CSI). The simulation results showed that if perfect CSI is not available in the pre-coding and only the signal phase is estimated, the performance loss is minimal and the system can reach its ideal performance by spending limited power. In any case, the closed-forms for the ideal state are a good proxy to predict the performance under non-ideal conditions.