Abstract
Due to their flexibility, aerial vehicles (AVs), such as unmanned aerial
vehicles and airships, are widely employed as relays to assist communications
between massive ground users (GUs) and satellites, forming an AV-relayed
ground-air-satellite solution (GASS). In GASS, the deployment of AVs is crucial
to ensure overall performance from GUs to satellites. This paper develops a
stochastic geometry-based analytical model for GASS under Matern hard-core
point process (MHCPP) distributed AVs. The 3D distributions of AVs and GUs are
modeled by considering their locations on spherical surfaces in the presence of
high-altitude satellites. Accordingly, we derive an overall connectivity
analytical model for GASS, which includes the average performance of AV-relayed
two-hop transmissions. Extensive numerical results validate the accuracy of the
connectivity model and provide essential insights for configuring AV
deployments.