Performance Analysis of NOMA-Based Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Relay Networks With CCI

Hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay networks (HSTRNs) which exploit relay cooperative technology in the integrated system of satellites and terrestrial base stations (BSs) are expected to offer enhanced transmission performance benefited from the spatial gain of independent fading paths. To enable multi-user accessing and resource sharing among users, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique can be applied in HSTRNs. In this paper, we consider a NOMA-based HSTRN where a satellite transmits signals to a relay base station (RBS) and a destination ground station (DGS), and RBS also serves a cellular user (CU) and DGS simultaneously by leveraging NOMA scheme. We assume that the satellite shares spectrum with a number of cellular small BSs (SBSs), hence SBSs will cause co-channel interference (CCI) to DGS, RBS and CU. We examine the transmission characteristics of the satellite and terrestrial links, and derive the closed-form expressions of the outage probability (OP) and average symbol error rate (ASER) of DGS and CU, respectively. Specially, we consider the effect of perfect and imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) on the ASER performance of CU. Then, considering the stochastic characteristics of satellite links and CCI, we analyze the mean energy efficiency (MEE) of the satellite and propose an optimal power allocation scheme which maximizes the MEE of the satellite and achieves system performance optimization. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis and the proposed power allocation scheme.