Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Cooperative Systems : Performance Analysis and System Dimensioning

Abstract

Satellite communication systems are used in the context of broadcasting, navigation, rescue, and disaster relief since they allow the provision of services over a wide coverage area. However, this coverage area is limited by the masking effect caused by obstacles that block the Line-Of-Sight (LOS) link between the satellite and a terrestrial user. The masking effect becomes more severe in case of low satellite elevation angles or when the user is indoor. To address this issue, Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Cooperative Systems (HSTCSs) have been proposed. In an HSTCS, the mobile user can exploit the diversity advantages by receiving signals from both satellite and terrestrial components. Fixed or mobile gap-fillers are used to relay the satellite signal. Most of satellites broadcasting systems have been implemented using fixed gap-fillers while mobile gap-fillers are needed in emergency cases when the fixed infrastructure is not available. In emergency scenarios (e.g., fire, earthquake, flood and explosion), the existing terrestrial infrastructure has been destroyed. So, an HSTCS is appropriate for transmitting the information between the rescuers and the central office. This allows the rescuers to operate efficiently. In particular, a fast and flexible implementation is needed and this could be provided by deploying mobile gap fillers (vehicle or mobile handheld). Recently, the topic of HSTCSs has gain interest in the research community. Several cooperative scenarios and transmission techniques have been proposed and studied. However, most of existing approaches only provide a performance analysis based on simulation results and the analytical expression of the exact Symbol Error Probability (SEP) is generally not provided. This dissertation focuses on the performance analysis of HSTCSs. The exact closed-form outage probability and SEP of Selective Decode-and-Forward (SDF) transmission scheme with and without relay selection are derived for both M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) schemes. This analytical SEP helps in designing and dimensioning HSTCSs. Our results are applicable to both fixed and mobile relaying techniques. Another part of the dissertation is dedicated to synchronization issues (time, frequency shifting/spreading). The mobility of users induces a Doppler spread in the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signal that destroys the orthogonality of subcarriers. The loss of orthogonality produces Inter-subCarrier Interference (ICI) and hence a degradation of the system performance in terms of SEP. In this case, we present the conditions in which this degradation can be compensated for by an increase in the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) at the transmitter side. The result depends on both the modulation scheme and the speed of the mobile users.