Performance Analysis of Novel Direct Access Schemes for LEO Satellites Based IoT Network

Abstract: This paper analyzes the performance of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites based internet-of-things (IoT) network where each IoT node makes use of multiple satellites to communicate with the ground station (GS). In this work, we consider fixed and variable gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying protocol at each satellite where the received signal from each IoT node is amplified before transmitting to the terrestrial GS for data processing. To analyze the performance of this novel LEO satellites based direct access architecture, the closed-form expressions for outage probability are derived considering two combining schemes at the GS: (i) selection combining; (ii) maximal ratio combining. Further, to gain more insights for diversity order and coding gain, asymptotic outage probability analysis at high SNR for both schemes is also performed. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the analytical results derived and also to develop several interesting insights into the system performance.