  This letter studies the performance of a low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite
communication system where the locations of the LEO satellites are modeled as a
binomial point process (BPP) on a spherical surface. In particular, we study
the user coverage probability for a scenario where satellite gateways (GWs) are
deployed on the ground to act as a relay between the users and the LEO
satellites. We use tools from stochastic geometry to derive the coverage
probability for the described setup assuming that LEO satellites are placed at
n different altitudes, given that the number of satellites at each altitude ak
is Nk for all k. To resemble practical scenarios where satellite communication
can play an important role in coverage enhancement, we compare the performance
of the considered setup with a scenario where the users are solely covered by a
fiber-connected base station (referred to as anchored base station or ABS in
the rest of the paper) at a relatively far distance, which is a common
challenge in rural and remote areas. Using numerical results, we show the
performance gain, in terms of coverage probability, at rural and remote areas
when LEO satellite communication systems are adopted. Finally, we draw multiple
system-level insights regarding the density of GWs required to outperform the
ABS, as well as the number of LEO satellites and their altitudes.
