Beam Tracking for Full-Duplex User Terminals in Low Earth Orbit Satellite Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a measurement-driven beam tracking scheme for full-duplex LEO satellite user terminals that effectively reduces self-interference without digital cancellation, enabling near-maximal SINRs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, measurement-based beam selection method that inherently cancels self-interference in full-duplex LEO satellite terminals without relying on explicit channel knowledge.

Findings

Self-interference is reduced below noise floor.

Beamforming gain remains high despite interference mitigation.

Near-maximal SINRs are achievable with the proposed scheme.

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel beam tracking scheme for full-duplex ground user terminals aiming to transmit uplink and receive downlink from two low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites at the same time and same frequency. Our proposed technique leverages observed phenomena from a recent measurement campaign to strategically select transmit and receive beams which couple low self-interference across the satellites' trajectories, thereby enabling in-band full-duplex operation. Our scheme takes a measurement-driven approach, meaning it does not rely on explicit knowledge of the self-interference channel and can inherently account for hardware impairments or other nonidealities. We show that our proposed scheme reliably selects beams which spatially cancel self-interference to below the noise floor, circumventing the need for digital/analog cancellation. Simulation results using satellite and orbital parameters published in 3GPP and FCC filings show that this substantial reduction in self-interference does not prohibitively compromise beamforming gain, allowing the user terminal to attain near-maximal SINRs, thus unlocking full-duplex operation.