Uplink Interference and Performance Analysis for Megasatellite Constellation

Abstract

Satellite communications play an important role in future Internet of Things (IoT) networks, and megasatellite constellations can further provide global coverage and high-quality services for IoT communications. In the megaconstellation, large-scale satellites are launched to enhance the capacity. However, the dense distribution of satellites brings intraconstellation interference, limiting the performance. In order to evaluate the restriction of interference caused by system parameters, such as the scale of constellation or the frequency reuse factor, we investigate uplink intraconstellation interference and performance of the megasatellite constellation. First, a multibeam polar constellation with uplink spatial frequency reuse is assumed. Then, the interference model is constructed considering the antenna gain of interfering user terminals and multibeam satellites, where the details of the satellite-fixed frequency reuse scheme and coordinates of co-frequency cells are provided. To evaluate the performance, expressions of outage probability, ergodic capacity, and sum ergodic capacity are driven. The analytical results disclose the impact of system design on the performance, and the accuracy of analysis results is obtained through extensive simulation evaluation. The results show that sum ergodic capacity achieves highest in the case of full frequency reuse for the frequency-limited constellation system, and it gets a linear growth at first but then keeps flat with a trend of fluctuating downward as the scale increases; therefore, the impact of the scale should be considered when constructing megaconstellations.