Uplink soft handover for LEO constellations: how strong the inter-satellite link should be

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Salem, Houcem Ben, Tarable, Alberto, Nordio, Alessandro, Makki, Behrooz
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Salem, Houcem Ben
Tarable, Alberto
Nordio, Alessandro
Makki, Behrooz
author_facet Salem, Houcem Ben
Tarable, Alberto
Nordio, Alessandro
Makki, Behrooz
contents We consider a constellation of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites connected to a handheld device on the ground. Due to the very large orbital speed, an effective handover strategy becomes of paramount importance. In particular, we study the benefits of soft handover in the uplink from the physical-layer point of view. We give a realistic model for both the ground-to-satellite and the inter-satellite links, following the 3GPP channel model for the former. We suppose that, during handover from a serving satellite to a target satellite, one of the two satellites forwards the received signal from the ground user to the other, thus acting as a relay. We quantify through simulations the loss of hard handover, compared to soft handover. For the latter, we test both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying techniques and verify that, at least in the simulated conditions, DF does not repay, in terms of block error rate (BLER), the increase of complexity with respect to AF. Also, we study the effect of the LEO constellation size on the network BLER. Finally, we show that, with soft handover, the impact of misalignment on the inter-satellite link is severe, especially at optical frequencies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_15131
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uplink soft handover for LEO constellations: how strong the inter-satellite link should be
Salem, Houcem Ben
Tarable, Alberto
Nordio, Alessandro
Makki, Behrooz
Information Theory
Signal Processing
We consider a constellation of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites connected to a handheld device on the ground. Due to the very large orbital speed, an effective handover strategy becomes of paramount importance. In particular, we study the benefits of soft handover in the uplink from the physical-layer point of view. We give a realistic model for both the ground-to-satellite and the inter-satellite links, following the 3GPP channel model for the former. We suppose that, during handover from a serving satellite to a target satellite, one of the two satellites forwards the received signal from the ground user to the other, thus acting as a relay. We quantify through simulations the loss of hard handover, compared to soft handover. For the latter, we test both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying techniques and verify that, at least in the simulated conditions, DF does not repay, in terms of block error rate (BLER), the increase of complexity with respect to AF. Also, we study the effect of the LEO constellation size on the network BLER. Finally, we show that, with soft handover, the impact of misalignment on the inter-satellite link is severe, especially at optical frequencies.
title Uplink soft handover for LEO constellations: how strong the inter-satellite link should be
topic Information Theory
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15131