NL-COMM-Sat: Breaking the Direct Device-to-Satellite Communication Barrier via "Aggressive" Non-Orthogonal Transmissions and Non-Linear Processing

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nikitopoulos, Konstantinos, Jayawardena, Chathura
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915961874939904
author Nikitopoulos, Konstantinos
Jayawardena, Chathura
author_facet Nikitopoulos, Konstantinos
Jayawardena, Chathura
contents Direct Device-to-Satellite (D2S) communications, which enable direct satellite connectivity with unmodified user equipment (UE), not only expand global coverage but also reshape the evolution of future access networks. However, D2S links face fundamental challenges due to inherently low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and limited spatial multiplexing gains arising from near line-of-sight propagation, both of which severely constrain achievable spectral efficiency. Despite the lack of spatial multiplexing, this work shows that aggressive non-orthogonal transmissions, where multiple users (e.g., four) transmit concurrently over the same frequency resources, even to a single receive antenna, can unlock substantial capacity gains that remain entirely unexploited by existing systems. Realizing these gains in practice, however, requires receiver architectures that, to the best of our knowledge, have not yet been developed. To this end, we introduce NL-COMM-Sat, an efficient and flexible framework that overcomes this limitation by enabling aggressive non-orthogonal signal transmissions. In contrast to conventional non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes, NL-COMM-Sat supports more than two UEs per receive antenna on the same frequency resource. The framework revisits optimal receiver design principles and proposes computationally efficient processing schemes that translate previously unexplored theoretical gains into tangible throughput improvements, even under realistic channel estimation errors and high-mobility Doppler conditions. Our evaluation shows that NL-COMM-Sat achieves up to a 2x increase in spectral efficiency compared to orthogonal multiple access and NOMA baselines across all considered SNR and Doppler regimes, even with a single-antenna receiver and user speeds of up to 500 km/h.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24453
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NL-COMM-Sat: Breaking the Direct Device-to-Satellite Communication Barrier via "Aggressive" Non-Orthogonal Transmissions and Non-Linear Processing
Nikitopoulos, Konstantinos
Jayawardena, Chathura
Signal Processing
Direct Device-to-Satellite (D2S) communications, which enable direct satellite connectivity with unmodified user equipment (UE), not only expand global coverage but also reshape the evolution of future access networks. However, D2S links face fundamental challenges due to inherently low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and limited spatial multiplexing gains arising from near line-of-sight propagation, both of which severely constrain achievable spectral efficiency. Despite the lack of spatial multiplexing, this work shows that aggressive non-orthogonal transmissions, where multiple users (e.g., four) transmit concurrently over the same frequency resources, even to a single receive antenna, can unlock substantial capacity gains that remain entirely unexploited by existing systems. Realizing these gains in practice, however, requires receiver architectures that, to the best of our knowledge, have not yet been developed. To this end, we introduce NL-COMM-Sat, an efficient and flexible framework that overcomes this limitation by enabling aggressive non-orthogonal signal transmissions. In contrast to conventional non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes, NL-COMM-Sat supports more than two UEs per receive antenna on the same frequency resource. The framework revisits optimal receiver design principles and proposes computationally efficient processing schemes that translate previously unexplored theoretical gains into tangible throughput improvements, even under realistic channel estimation errors and high-mobility Doppler conditions. Our evaluation shows that NL-COMM-Sat achieves up to a 2x increase in spectral efficiency compared to orthogonal multiple access and NOMA baselines across all considered SNR and Doppler regimes, even with a single-antenna receiver and user speeds of up to 500 km/h.
title NL-COMM-Sat: Breaking the Direct Device-to-Satellite Communication Barrier via "Aggressive" Non-Orthogonal Transmissions and Non-Linear Processing
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24453