Performance of the Cooperative Terrestrial Satellite Networks in the presence of Shadowed Ricean Channel Fading

Abstract

Satellite networks can deliver seamless services to ground users with a wide range of coverage, making them ideal for broadcasting or multicasting services. The Satellite-terrestrial cooperative networks have materialized as an important technology to provide a great variety of communication services. This research looked at a cooperative terrestrial satellite network system that includes a source satellite (S), a relay named R that uses the decode and forward (DF) protocol, and a destination earth station (D). The fading channel model is assumed to be Shadowed-Ricean/Rayleigh fading in the case of S to D and S to R channel links. Similarly, R-D channel model is assumed as Rayleigh fading. There are two phases of operations considered. In the first phase, the D and R terminals receive the information from S and in the second phase, the D receives the decode and forwarded information from R. The destination combines both the information using maximal ratio combining (MRC) and selection combining (SC) techniques. For this system model, an algorithm to find the symbol error probability (SEP) performance of the system for binary phase shift keying modulation has been developed. The performance comparison curves have been plotted for SC Vs MRC and variants of fading severity factor.