Satellite Clusters Flying in Formation: Orbital Configuration-Dependent Performance Analyses

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how the orbital configuration of satellite clusters affects communication performance, deriving exact and approximate outage probability expressions, and providing insights for designing reliable satellite formations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analytical framework for evaluating outage probability based on satellite orbital configurations, including exact and approximate formulas, and asymptotic analysis.

Findings

Exact outage probability expressions for linear and circular formations.

Approximate formulas using second-order moment-matching.

Performance insights for satellite cluster design based on orbital parameters.

Abstract

This paper considers a downlink satellite communication system where a satellite cluster, i.e., a satellite swarm consisting of one leader and multiple follower satellites, serves a ground terminal. The satellites in the cluster form either a linear or circular formation moving in a group and cooperatively send their signals by maximum ratio transmission precoding. We first conduct a coordinate transformation to effectively capture the relative positions of satellites in the cluster. Next, we derive an exact expression for the orbital configuration-dependent outage probability under the Nakagami fading by using the distribution of the sum of independent Gamma random variables. In addition, we obtain a simpler approximated expression for the outage probability with the help of second-order moment-matching. We also analyze asymptotic behavior in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime and the diversity order of the outage performance. Finally, we verify the analytical results through Monte Carlo simulations. Our analytical results provide the performance of satellite cluster-based communication systems based on specific orbital configurations, which can be used to design reliable satellite clusters in terms of cluster size, formation, and orbits.