Properties of Space MIMO Communication Channels

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the unique properties of space MIMO channels, highlighting their simple structure, predictable statistics, and a fundamental tradeoff between spectral and energy efficiency due to launch costs.

Contribution

It provides a detailed characterization of space MIMO channels, emphasizing their distinct statistical properties and the impact of space-specific constraints on communication performance.

Findings

Space MIMO channels have a simple, predictable structure.

Satellite clusters can effectively control channel characteristics.

A fundamental tradeoff exists between spectral and energy efficiency in space MIMO.

Abstract

This paper discusses the characteristics of a space-to-space multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) communication channel that distinguish it from more common terrestrial MIMO communication channels. These characteristics imply that the channel matrices for space communication channels have a particularly simple structure that leads to statistical characteristics that are both predictable and readily controllable using clusters of satellites as distributed communication nodes. Furthermore, the extremely high cost of launching mass into space introduces a constraint into the channel capacity equation that leads to a spectral-efficiency vs. energy-efficiency tradeoff for space MIMO communication that is fundamentally different from the tradeoff that is generally considered applicable to terrestrial MIMO communication systems.