Performance analysis of dual-hop satellite relay networks with hardware impairments and co-channel interference

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the impact of hardware impairments on the outage performance and the instantaneous capacity of dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) satellite relay networks in the presence of co-channel interference. Specifically, the exact closed-form expression for the outage probability and the analytical expression for the instantaneous capacity of the system are derived over a shadowed-Rician fading channel, which provides a fast means to evaluate the impact of hardware impairments on the system performance. Our results demonstrate that the outage floor occurs and the capacity upper bound appears when the hardware impairments exist. In addition, simulation results were provided to verify the correctness of the analytical results