Performance Bounds and Robust Filtering for LEO Inter-Satellite Synchronization under Cross-Epoch Doppler Coupling
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arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , , , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866915855127805952 |
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| author | Dong, Haofan Wang, Houtianfu Cai, Hanlin Akan, Ozgur B. |
| author_facet | Dong, Haofan Wang, Houtianfu Cai, Hanlin Akan, Ozgur B. |
| contents | Low Earth orbit (LEO) inter-satellite links (ISLs) must achieve joint synchronization and ranging under severe hardware impairments, namely oscillator phase noise, clock drift, and measurement outliers, exacerbated by rapid relative dynamics exceeding 7~km/s. In coherent Doppler processing, the frequency observable depends on the \emph{difference} between consecutive carrier phase states, creating a cross-epoch coupling structure that fundamentally affects estimation-theoretic performance limits. This paper makes three contributions. First, we prove analytically that this cross-epoch Doppler coupling is \emph{necessary} to avoid unbounded carrier phase uncertainty: without it, phase variance grows linearly without bound. Second, we derive a posterior Cramér-Rao bound (PCRB) via the Tichavský recursion that explicitly incorporates the resulting 10$\times$10 block information structure. Third, we propose a hybrid robust filtering framework combining hard gating for impulsive cycle-slip outliers with Huber M-estimation for heavy-tail contamination, using TASD-aware innovation covariance to account for cross-epoch uncertainty in residual normalization. Monte Carlo simulations at Ka-band confirm that the PCRB accurately lower-bounds estimator performance under nominal conditions, while the hybrid method reduces 95th-percentile phase error by 27--93\% compared to standard extended Kalman filtering across different outlier regimes. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_11280 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Performance Bounds and Robust Filtering for LEO Inter-Satellite Synchronization under Cross-Epoch Doppler Coupling Dong, Haofan Wang, Houtianfu Cai, Hanlin Akan, Ozgur B. Signal Processing Low Earth orbit (LEO) inter-satellite links (ISLs) must achieve joint synchronization and ranging under severe hardware impairments, namely oscillator phase noise, clock drift, and measurement outliers, exacerbated by rapid relative dynamics exceeding 7~km/s. In coherent Doppler processing, the frequency observable depends on the \emph{difference} between consecutive carrier phase states, creating a cross-epoch coupling structure that fundamentally affects estimation-theoretic performance limits. This paper makes three contributions. First, we prove analytically that this cross-epoch Doppler coupling is \emph{necessary} to avoid unbounded carrier phase uncertainty: without it, phase variance grows linearly without bound. Second, we derive a posterior Cramér-Rao bound (PCRB) via the Tichavský recursion that explicitly incorporates the resulting 10$\times$10 block information structure. Third, we propose a hybrid robust filtering framework combining hard gating for impulsive cycle-slip outliers with Huber M-estimation for heavy-tail contamination, using TASD-aware innovation covariance to account for cross-epoch uncertainty in residual normalization. Monte Carlo simulations at Ka-band confirm that the PCRB accurately lower-bounds estimator performance under nominal conditions, while the hybrid method reduces 95th-percentile phase error by 27--93\% compared to standard extended Kalman filtering across different outlier regimes. |
| title | Performance Bounds and Robust Filtering for LEO Inter-Satellite Synchronization under Cross-Epoch Doppler Coupling |
| topic | Signal Processing |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11280 |