Cooperative Beam Hopping for Accurate Positioning in Ultra-Dense LEO Satellite Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cooperative beam hopping framework for ultra-dense LEO satellite networks, enhancing positioning accuracy by adaptively optimizing beam layouts and resource allocation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cooperative beam hopping method with an efficient control algorithm to improve satellite positioning performance in dense LEO networks.

Findings

Significant CRLB performance improvement with FBHCA

Effective joint optimization of user association, beam hopping, and power allocation

Validation through 3GPP-based simulation platform

Abstract

In ultra-dense LEO satellite networks, conventional communication-oriented beam pattern design cannot provide multiple favorable signals from different satellites simultaneously, and thus leads to poor positioning performance. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel cooperative beam hopping (BH) framework to adaptively tune beam layouts suitable for multi-satellite coordinated positioning. On this basis, a joint user association, BH design and power allocation optimization problem is formulated to minimize average Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB). An efficient flexible BH control algorithm (FBHCA) is then proposed to solve the problem. Finally, a thorough experimental platform is built following the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) defined non-terrestrial network (NTN) simulation parameters to validate the performance gain of the devised algorithm. The numerical results demonstrate that FBHCA can significantly improve CRLB performance over the benchmark scheme.