Abstract
Link budgets are widely applied to evaluate communication links for low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. However, approaches to calculate the received power from LEO satellites have followed similar procedures to those for Geostationary (GEO) satellites and other fixed distance wireless systems, ignoring the satellite mobility that causes continuous changes in the path length and in the elevation angle. Link budgets found in the literature for LEO communication systems have commonly opted to characterize the best and worst-cases of the received signal; however, this common approach tells little about how often those cases occur, and little can be inferred about the expected received power and its measures of dispersion. This article introduces an innovative methodology to evaluate LEO link budgets using the long term statistics and probabilities of occurrence of the elevation angle, which is characterized in this work through a random variable. This characterization of the elevation angle through a random variable allows the calculation of the expected value of the received power, its standard deviation, quantiles, among other quantities. The received power is essential to calculate other link indicators such as the carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N), and with the proposed methodology it can be now calculated considering the path length and elevation angle variability that occur for LEO satellites.
Highlights
The number of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites has significantly increased since the Iridium constellation deployment in the ’90s and this number increases and represents the potential infrastructure for the generation satellites planned to be massively deployed, [1]
LEO has been popular for deployment of small satellites such as CubeSats, because there are several advantages for small and big satellites at LEO compared to higher orbits, such as a shorter path length and round trip time (RTT)
LINK BUDGET CALCULATIONS Here we present the calculations for the link budget
Summary
The number of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites has significantly increased since the Iridium constellation deployment in the ’90s and this number increases and represents the potential infrastructure for the generation satellites planned to be massively deployed, [1]. LEO has been popular for deployment of small satellites such as CubeSats, because there are several advantages for small and big satellites at LEO compared to higher orbits, such as a shorter path length and round trip time (RTT). One notorious difference between those two channels is that GEO often considers a fixed elevation angle, θ. For LEO, from the early works describing this channel, [2], up to more recent approaches, [3], it has been notorious the need to consider the variations of θ in order to characterize the channel and calculate the received signal power
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