A Hybrid NOMA-OMA Scheme for Inter-plane Intersatellite Communications in Massive LEO Constellations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid NOMA-OMA communication scheme for inter-plane inter-satellite links in massive LEO constellations, improving fairness and capacity by exploiting Doppler frequency diversity.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid multiple access scheme combining NOMA and OMA for inter-satellite links, optimizing fairness and capacity in LEO constellations.

Findings

Hybrid NOMA-OMA outperforms pure-OMA in capacity.

Hybrid NOMA-OMA improves fairness over pure-NOMA.

Numerical results confirm theoretical advantages.

Abstract

Communication between satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellations takes place through inter-satellite links (ISLs). Unlike intra-plane ISLs, which interconnect satellites belonging to the same orbital plane with fixed relative distance, inter-plane ISLs experience significant Doppler frequency shifts, since satellites belonging to different orbital planes exhibit timevarying relative distance (required, e.g., to minimize the risk of physical collisions between satellites). In this paper, we consider the problem of connecting multiple satellites, belonging to a massive LEO constellation, to a receiving satellite, referred to as the sink. Specifically, we consider a hybrid multiple access scheme, which employs a combination of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), where radio-frequency ISLs share the same time-frequency resource blocks, and orthogonal multiple access (OMA), where ISLs employ orthogonal resource blocks. The set of satellites transmitting towards the sink is divided into groups, where NOMA is employed within each group, whereas OMA is used to separate different groups. Such a scheme subsumes as special cases both pure-OMA and pure-NOMA. Our study highlights that similar Doppler frequency shifts have a significant impact on the individual rates of the satellites in a pure-NOMA scheme, thus reducing the network fairness of this technique. Motivated by such a fact, we develop design strategies of the proposed hybrid NOMA-OMA scheme, which exploit inter-plane Doppler frequency diversity to enhance fairness among the satellites, while ensuring a significantly higher sumrate capacity compared to the pure-OMA technique. Numerical results corroborate our theoretical analysis, by demonstrating both the fairness enhancement of the proposed techniques over the pure-NOMA scheme, as well as their capacity improvement over the pure-OMA one.