Broadband LEO Satellite Communications: Architectures and Key Technologies

By Yongtao Su, Yaoqi Liu, Yiqing Zhou, Jinhong Yuan, H. Cao, Jinglin Shi. IEEE wireless communications, 2019

529 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview for key issues in broadband LEO satellite communication systems. First of all, the network architecture is introduced, which is the basis of the whole system. The space-based LEO system with ISL, which requires a small number of ground gateways, is the focus. In this system, the satellite constellation design is important with impact on key system performances such as coverage. Two popular LEO constellations, the walker Delta and Star constellations, are introduced. Given satellite constellations, proper beam coverage schemes should be employed at satellites to provide seamless coverage all over the world. A hybrid wide and spot beam coverage scheme is presented, where the LEO provides a wide beam for large area coverage and several steering spot beams for highspeed data access. Moreover, special coverage schemes should be designed in broadband LEO systems for the interference coordination between LEO and GEO. To protect GEO communications, LEO satellites should be turned off if they cause interference to GEO. In this case, to provide services for users covered by the turned-off LEO satellites, a progressive pitch method and a coverage expanding method can be employed. Finally, the coverage performance of LEO is also closely related to resource management schemes. The global resource management for broadband LEO systems is complicated, involving a large amount of data, and a two-level management structure should be employed. Using this structure, an NMC with powerful storage and processing capabilities is employed to carry out the first-level management, making strategies based on all information collected from the whole system. Then satellite base stations with limited capabilities are employed to respond to the strategies generated by NMC in real time.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49f18b592f12b62f8ea998d057cb1bf4b7e703b2

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Citations in the corpus

CubeSat Communications: Recent Advances and Future Challenges (2019, background): “For instance, in [39], Su et al. present a hybrid wide-and spot-beam schemes for LEO satellites.”
Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks Toward 6G: Architectures, Applications, and Challenges (2022, background): “Satellite communication networks provide a direct solution for the coverage issue with the wide coverage ability [6].”
A Survey on Nongeostationary Satellite Systems: The Communication Perspective (2021, background): “The overlapping coverage of multiple NGSO satellites, especially if they belong to different orbital planes, poses a challenge for the resource allocation, as explained before, since asynchronous satellites can attempt to satisfy the same demand, thus heavily interfering with each other and wasting ”