Abstract— This paper investigates a hybrid satellite-terrestrial cooperative relaying communications network (HSTCN) under independent and non-identical shadowed Rician and Nakagami-� fading channels. It evaluates the performance of such a network using amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative relaying protocol. The maximal ratio com¬bining (MRC) technique is used at the destination to com¬bine the signals received from the source and cooperating relay nodes. An analytical approach is derived to evaluate the performance of the system in terms of outage probability and symbol error rate (SER). The closed form expressions for the probability density function (PDF), cumulative dis¬tribution function (CDF) and moment generating function (MGF) of the end-to-end signal to noise ratio (SNR) are also derived. The derived analytical expressions are applied to the general operating conditions with the help of satellite channel data available from the literature. The analytical results are compared with Monte Carlo simulations. The results show the improvement in the performance of the HSTCN under challenging fading conditions with the help of fixed multiple terrestrial relay nodes.

Index Terms— Hybrid satellite-terrestrial, cooperative relay, amplify and forward, fading channels, combined probability density function, moment generating function, outage prob-ability, symbol error rate.

Cite:Arif Iqbal and Kazi M Ahmed, "A Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Cooperative Network over Non Identically Distributed Fading Channels," Journal of Communications, vol. 6, no.7, pp.581-589, 2011. Doi: 10.4304/jcm.6.7.581-589