Abstract
This paper investigates the performance of non-orthogonal multiple
access (NOMA) based hybrid satellite-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
systems, where a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communicates with the
ground users via a decode and forward (DF) UAV relay. We investigate a
two NOMA users system, where a far user (FU) and a near user (NU) are
served by the UAV which is located at a certain height above the origin
of the coverage circle. The channel between satellite and UAV is assumed
to follow a Shadowed-Rician fading and the channels between UAV and
users are assumed to follow a Nakagami-m fading. New closed-form
expressions of the outage probabilities for the two users and the system
are derived. Different from other work in literature, we take into
consideration different parameters affecting the total link budget.
Additionally, we propose an algorithm for minimizing the system outage
probability. The mathematical analysis is verified by extensive
representative Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations. Finally, simulations are
provided to demonstrate the impact of important parameters on the
considered system as well as the superiority of the NOMA scheme the over
reference scheme.