Physical Beam Sharing for Communications With Multiple Low Earth Orbit Satellites

Physical (analog) beamforming is expected to become an important technique in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite transmission in upcoming 6G communications. To build dense networks via LEO satellites and decrease deployment expenses, the corresponding satellites should have minimal hardware, low computational complexity, and limited power consumption. Additionally, issues such as different propagation delays, Doppler effects, long feedback delays, and serious attenuation caused by bad weather should also be addressed in LEO satellite communications. This work proposes a novel physical beam sharing scheme for multiple-satellite systems that enables a satellite to simultaneously serve multiple users using only one Radio-Frequency (RF) chain, consequently leading to a significant reduction in hardware complexity and power consumption. In this case, all users can achieve full multiplexing gain. Furthermore, we propose two ways of optimizing for this novel scheme. One is maximizing the throughput of all users, and the other is minimizing the LEO satellite system’s power consumption. For the problems, we propose both solutions using instantaneous Channel State Information (iCSI) and long-term statistical Channel State Information (sCSI). Simulation results demonstrated that the proposals significantly outperform conventional schemes in terms of throughput and power consumption, and the performance of the proposed sCSI solutions is close to that of iCSI ones.