Distributed HAPS-assisted communications in FSO/RF space-air-ground integrated networks

Abstract Space-air-ground integrated (SAGI) communication networks have been envisioned as one of the pillars of the next generation communications (6 G). This type of networks are expected to offer fairness and high quality of services in various scenarios where traditional terrestrial communication systems cannot efficiently support due to inherent limitations, e.g., limited coverage areas. In this paper, a distributed transmission scheme is proposed in a SAGI communication network that utilizes free-space-optical (FSO)/radio frequency (RF) links. More specifically, a set of N high altitude platform systems are cooperatively transmit the received signal to the ground station, using the decode-and-forward relaying protocol. For this system, generic analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) have been derived that take into consideration the impact of turbulence, pointing errors, and atmospheric attenuation (for the FSO links) as well as the impact of composite fading (for the RF links). Moreover, asymptotic closed-form expressions for the OP are also presented, which are used to extract useful insights for the system under consideration. The numerical evaluated results that are illustrated reveal the impact of various system and channel models parameters on the system’s performance. From these results, it is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms a pure FSO-based relaying scheme, which has been used as a benchmark, under different environmental conditions.