Performance of Spectrum Sharing in Hybrid Satellite Terrestrial Network with Opportunistic Relay Selection

In this paper, we consider the uplink of a hybrid satellite‐terrestrial spectrum sharing system, in which satellite terminal communicates with satellite through terrestrial relay‐assisted transmission. To accommodate expanding networks within limited spectrum, spectrum sharing is considered a promising candidate. For the system in which satellite terminals and terrestrial terminals share spectrum, we propose opportunistic relay selected spectrum sharing method based on decoding and forwarding protocol. Selecting the optimal relay station is aimed at minimizing the outage probability of the satellite terminal and maximizing the throughput of the system. Due to spectrum sharing policy and imperfections in the RF front end, we also consider the effects of cochannel interference (CCI) and hardware impairments (HIs). The satellite link is modeled as Shadowed‐Rician fading, and the terrestrial link uses Nakagami‐m fading. In addition, we deduce the closed‐form analytical expressions of the satellite terminal outage probability, deduce the asymptotic expressions under the condition of high signal‐to‐noise ratio, and analyze their achievable diversity orders. Numerical and simulation results validate the performance gain of opportunistic relay selection compared to partial relay selection. Monte Carlo simulations confirm the correctness of the theoretical analysis and illustrate the effects of CCI and HIs on the system.