Outage Analysis of NOMA-Based Multiple-Antenna Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Relay Networks

In this letter, the outage performance of a novel non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay network (HSTRN) is analyzed, where the satellite can directly communicate with one user while communicating with the other user only through an amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-antenna relay. Exact and asymptotic outage probabilities of both users are derived by considering both fixed gain (FG) and variable gain (VG) AF relaying protocols, along with practical imperfect successive interference cancellation (I-SIC). Numerical results are provided to validate our analysis and unveil some useful engineering insights, such as the impacts of I-SIC, the number of antennas and the choice of relaying protocols on the system performance.