Satellite Communications in the New Space Era: A Survey and Future Challenges

By O. Kodheli, E. Lagunas, N. Maturo, S. Sharma, B. Shankar, J. Montoya, J. Duncan, D. Spano, S. Chatzinotas, S. Kisseleff and 4 more. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2020

1,247 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Satellite communications (SatComs) have recently entered a period of renewed interest motivated by technological advances and nurtured through private investment and ventures. The present survey aims at capturing the state of the art in SatComs, while highlighting the most promising open research topics. Firstly, the main innovation drivers are motivated, such as new constellation types, on-board processing capabilities, non-terrestrial networks and space-based data collection/processing. Secondly, the most promising applications are described, i.e., 5G integration, space communications, Earth observation, aeronautical and maritime tracking and communication. Subsequently, an in-depth literature review is provided across five axes: i) system aspects, ii) air interface, iii) medium access, iv) networking, v) testbeds & prototyping. Finally, a number of future challenges and the respective open research topics are described.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16fb3981415fc7a294d13eafc6c179fbe7869822

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. Rui Zhang
2. Jie Xu
3. Lipeng Zhu
4. Wenyan Ma
5. Yonina C. Eldar
6. Fan Liu
7. Christos Masouros
8. Yuanhao Cui

In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Jie Xu
2. Rui Zhang
3. Mohammad Mahdi Azari
4. Symeon Chatzinotas
5. Lipeng Zhu
6. Sofie Pollin
7. Björn E. Ottersten
8. Yonina C. Eldar

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Rui Zhang
2. Lipeng Zhu
3. Jie Xu
4. Wenyan Ma
5. Symeon Chatzinotas
6. Yonina C. Eldar
7. Emil Björnson
8. Tony X. Han

Citations in the corpus

• Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Efficient Holographic MIMO Communications in 6G (2023, neutral): “communications [6], and programmable metasurfaces [7], to name just a few.”
• Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks Toward 6G: Architectures, Applications, and Challenges (2022, background): “In [27], the major use cases for integrated satellite-terrestrial networks were presented.”
• Movable Antennas for Wireless Communication: Opportunities and Challenges (2023, background): “Particularly, low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites may travel and serve different ground areas which may have distinct user distributions and beam coverage requirements [6].”
• Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond (2021, background): “, low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite networks [223], [224], Terahertz (THz) communications and sensing [225], [226], digital twins [227], [228], orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation [229]–[231], and more.”
• Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey (2021, background): “3) Resource Allocation: Since satellite resources are scarce, it is necessary to efficiently allocate them [9].”
• A Survey on Nongeostationary Satellite Systems: The Communication Perspective (2021, background): “Over the last few years, a number of good surveys and tutorials pertained to satellite communications appeared in the literature, [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], to report and study the technical developments and challenges, including satellite net”