UAV Based Satellite-Terrestrial Systems With Hardware Impairment and Imperfect SIC: Performance Analysis of User Pairs

We investigated the outage performance of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in satellite-terrestrial systems which contain hardware impairments. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was implemented to forward signals from a satellite to users on the ground. A two-user model was applied to achieve spectral efficiency. In practical, real-life scenarios, the UAV and ground users encounter issues with imperfect hardware. We examined the performance gap between two users experiencing practical problems such as hardware impairment and imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC). To implement a practical scenario, Shadow-Rician fading was adopted in the satellite links, and Rician fading was employed in the terrestrial links for ground users. In the main results, we derived the closed-form expression of the outage probability, and to evaluate the system performance of two NOMA users, we obtained the approximate expressions for high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). Finally, we produced Monte-Carlo simulations to verify the analytical expressions and demonstrate the effect of the main system parameters, such as the number of transmit antennas on the satellite, transmit SNR, and level of hardware impairment on the system performance metric.