Performance Analysis of Overlay Satellite‐Air‐Ground Integrated Networks With Spatially Random Nodes

This paper analyzes an overlay satellite‐air‐ground integrated network (OSAGIN) in which a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite transmits information to ground users (GUs) with the assistance of a coexisting air‐to‐air (A2A) communication network. In particular, to accurately reflect the practical large‐scale transmission scenarios, the impact of spatial randomness in the locations of the satellite, aerial user, and GUs is explicitly incorporated to provide a realistic and comprehensive performance evaluation of the outage behavior in the satellite‐to‐ground (S2G) and A2A networks. To characterize the underlying propagation environment, the satellite channel is described by shadowed‐Rician fading, the ground channel by Nakagami‐ m fading, and the aerial channel by Rician fading. Analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) of the networks are obtained under the above mixed fading environments. To offer a complete performance evaluation of the aerial communication network, both perfect and imperfect interference cancellation cases are studied. The analytical results demonstrate that the performance of the system is significantly affected by the spectrum‐sharing factor and the distance between the communicating nodes. The effect of important system and channel parameters is also discussed, providing valuable information for the design of spectrally efficient satellite‐assisted networks. Further, Monte Carlo simulations are employed to corroborate the analytical results.