On the performance of hybrid satellite-terrestrial cooperative networks with interferences

The paper investigates the performance of a hybrid satellite-terrestrial cooperative network (HSTCN), where some terrestrial amplify-and-forward (AF) relays are employed to assist the signal transmission from a satellite to a destination, which is corrupted by multiple co-channel interferences (CCIs). In this system, the satellite links undergo Shadowing-Rician fading while the terrestrial links experience Rayleigh fading. Specifically, by assuming that maximum ratio combining (MRC) is used at the destination, we first derive the moment generating function (MGF) of the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). With the help of MGF, we then present the analytical average symbol error rate (ASER) expression for the considered cooperative system. Moreover, to gain further insights, the asymptotic ASER analysis in terms of the diversity order and array gain is also developed. Finally, numerical results are given to demonstrate the validity of the performance analysis and the impacts of shadowing parameters, relay number and CCIs on the considered HSTCN.