Performance analysis of cooperative relaying communications for space information networks

The backbone satellites relaying for space information networks (SINs) is regarded as an effective way to enhance the throughput as well as the communication-time-window of satellite communications. The performance of SINs downlink cooperative communications via an amplify-and-forward (AF) backbone satellite relaying is investigated in this paper, where we assume both of the source-destination and relay-destination links undergo shadowed-Rician fading, and the source-relay link follows Rician fading, respectively. Moreover, the effect of the backbone relaying satellite perturbation is considered, and the maximum ratio combining (MRC) is implemented at the destination. Based on this setup, we first derive the approximate statistical distribution of signal-to-noise ratio of the system, then the closed-form expressions are obtained to efficiently evaluate the average symbol error rate (ASER) of the system. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the accuracy of our performance analysis.