Massive MIMO Downlink Transmission for LEO Satellite Communications

Poster (2021, September)

We investigate the downlink (DL) transmit strategy for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) low-earthorbit (LEO) satellite communication (SATCOM) systems, in which only the slow-varying ... [more ▼]

We investigate the downlink (DL) transmit strategy for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) low-earthorbit (LEO) satellite communication (SATCOM) systems, in which only the slow-varying statistical channel state information is known at the transmitter side. First, we establish the massive MIMO LEO satellite channel model, in which the uniform planar arrays are deployed at both the satellite and user terminals (UTs). Building on the rank-one property of satellite channel matrices, we show that transmitting a single data stream to each UT is optimal for the ergodic sum rate maximization. This result is of great importance for massive MIMO LEO SATCOM systems, since the sophisticated design of transmit covariance matrices is turned into that of precoding vectors, with no loss of optimality at all. Furthermore, we conceive an algorithm to compute the precoding vectors. Simulation results show the significant performance gains of the proposed approaches over the previous schemes. [less ▲]

Massive MIMO Transmission for LEO Satellite Communications

in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (2020), 38(8), 1851-1865

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications are expected to be incorporated in future wireless networks, in particular 5G and beyond networks, to provide global wireless access with enhanced data rates ... [more ▼]

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications are expected to be incorporated in future wireless networks, in particular 5G and beyond networks, to provide global wireless access with enhanced data rates. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques, though widely used in terrestrial communication systems, have not been applied to LEO satellite communication systems. In this paper, we propose a massive MIMO transmission scheme with full frequency reuse (FFR) for LEO satellite communication systems and exploit statistical channel state information (sCSI) to address the difficulty of obtaining instantaneous CSI (iCSI) at the transmitter. We first establish the massive MIMO channel model for LEO satellite communications and simplify the transmission designs via performing Doppler and delay compensations at user terminals (UTs). Then, we develop the low-complexity sCSI based downlink (DL) precoder and uplink (UL) receiver in closed-form, aiming to maximize the average signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (ASLNR) and the average signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (ASINR), respectively. It is shown that the DL ASLNRs and UL ASINRs of all UTs reach their upper bounds under some channel condition. Motivated by this, we propose a space angle based user grouping (SAUG) algorithm to schedule the served UTs into different groups, where each group of UTs use the same time and frequency resource. The proposed algorithm is asymptotically optimal in the sense that the lower and upper bounds of the achievable rate coincide when the number of satellite antennas or UT groups is sufficiently large. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed massive MIMO transmission scheme with FFR significantly enhances the data rate of LEO satellite communication systems. Notably, the proposed sCSI based precoder and receiver achieve the similar performance with the iCSI based ones that are often infeasible in practice. [less ▲]