On Performance of Cooperative Satellite-AAV-Secured Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Systems With Phase Errors

This work studies the secrecy outage performance (SOP) of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-empowered satellite-autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) networks, where multiple antennas satellite communicates with its legitimate destination via a decode-and-forward AAV combined with an RIS in the presence of the eavesdropper. Considering the satellite channels and the terrestrial channels obeying Shadowed-Rician fading and Nakagami-m fading, respectively, the existence of the direct connections between AAV and ground terminals, and the imperfection of phase-shift alignment at RIS, we develop an information-theoretic framework to evaluate the SOP in terms of approximate and asymptotic manners. These guide the system engineering insights, including the configuration of bit control at RISs and the transmit power slope. Numerical results not only corroborate the efficacy of the developed framework but also characterize the SOP behaviour under variation of shadowing effects, RIS configurations, direct or non-direct communication scenarios, and AAV’s trajectory in 3D cylindrical coordinates.