Outage Probability Analysis of LR-FHSS and D2D-Aided LR-FHSS Protocols in Shadowed-Rice Fading Direct-to-Satellite IoT Networks

In this article, we present a device-to-device (D2D) transmission scheme for aiding long-range frequency-hopping spread spectrum (LR-FHSS) LoRaWAN protocol with application in direct-to-satellite Internet of Things (IoT) networks. We consider a practical ground-to-satellite fading model, i.e., shadowed-Rice channel, and derive the outage performance of the LR-FHSS network. With the help of network coding, a D2D-aided LR-FHSS transmission scheme is proposed to improve the network capacity for which a closed-form outage probability expression is also derived. The obtained analytical expressions for both LR-FHSS and D2D-aided LR-FHSS outage probabilities are validated by computer simulations for different parts of the analysis capturing the effects of noise, fading, unslotted ALOHA-based time scheduling, the receiver’s capture effect, IoT device distributions, and distance from node to satellite. The total outage probability for the D2D-aided LR-FHSS shows a considerable increase of 249.9% and 150.1% in network capacity at a typical outage of 10−2 for the data rates of DR6 (325 bps) and DR5 (162 bps), respectively, when compared to LR-FHSS. This is obtained at the cost of a minimum of one and a maximum of two additional transmissions per IoT end device imposed by the D2D scheme in each time slot.