Non-Coherent Massive MIMO Integration in Satellite Communication

TL;DR

This paper explores the integration of non-coherent massive MIMO technology into satellite communication systems, addressing channel information challenges and demonstrating promising performance in low SNR regimes.

Contribution

It is the first to analyze non-coherent mMIMO application in satellite communications, highlighting its potential to improve performance without extensive channel state information.

Findings

Performance in BER and antenna count approaches terrestrial link requirements

Enables operation in low SNR regimes for satellite links

Identifies challenges and opportunities in satellite-mMIMO integration

Abstract

Massive Multiple Input-Multiple Output (mMIMO) technique has been considered an efficient standard to improve the transmission rate significantly for the following wireless communication systems, such as 5G and beyond. However, implementing this technology has been facing a critical issue of acquiring much channel state information. Primarily, this problem becomes more criticising in the integrated satellite and terrestrial networks (3GPP-Release 15) due to the countable high transmission delay. To deal with this challenging problem, the mMIMO-empowered non-coherent technique can be a promising solution. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first work considering employing the non-coherent mMIMO in satellite communication systems. This work aims to analyse the challenges and opportunities emerging with this integration. Moreover, we identified the issues in this conjunction. The preliminary results presented in this work show that the performance measured in bit error rate (BER) and the number of antennas are not far from that required for terrestrial links. Furthermore, thanks to mMIMO in conjunction with the non-coherent approach, we can work in a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, which is an excellent advantage for satellite links.