Emerging NGSO Constellations: Spectral Coexistence with GSO Satellite Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper reviews the regulatory, technical, and AI-driven strategies for enabling spectral coexistence between emerging NGSO LEO satellite constellations and traditional GSO systems, highlighting interference challenges and mitigation techniques.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of spectrum sharing regulations, interference mitigation methods, and the potential role of AI in managing GSO-NGSO coexistence.

Findings

Increased potential for inter-system interference between GSO and NGSO satellites.

Various interference mitigation strategies, including beamforming and AI-based detection.

Regulatory landscape evolving post-WRC-23 to accommodate NGSO deployments.

Abstract

Global communications have undergone a paradigm shift with the rapid expansion of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, offering a new space era of reduced latency and ubiquitous, high-speed broadband internet access. However, the fast developments in LEO orbits pose significant challenges, particularly the coexistence with geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellite systems. This article presents an overview of the regulatory aspects that cover the spectrum sharing in the bands allocated to the Fixed Satellite Service between geostationary networks (GSO) and non-geostationary systems (NGSO), as well as the main interference mitigation techniques for their coexistence. Our work highlights the increased potential for inter-system interference. It explores the regulatory landscape following the World Radio Conference (WRC-23). We discuss the different interference management strategies proposed for the GSO-NGSO spectral coexistence, including on-board and ground-based approaches and more advanced mitigation techniques based on beamforming. Moving onto operational aspects related to the sharing of spectrum, we introduce recent work on interference detection, identification, and mitigation and provide our vision of the emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the aforementioned tasks.