Continuous Aperture Array-Assisted Integrated Communication and Navigation in LEO Satellite Constellations
2026-07-10 • Information Theory
Information Theory
AI summaryⓘ
The authors propose a new system using special antennas called continuous aperture arrays on satellites to help with both communication and navigation from low Earth orbit. They create a model that allows multiple satellites to send data and navigation signals at the same time using the same frequencies. The authors then work out how well this system can communicate data and determine location accuracy. To make positioning more precise without sacrificing signal quality, they design an optimization method to balance these goals. Their tests show this approach works better than older antenna systems and other common methods.
Continuous Aperture Array (CAPA)Low Earth Orbit (LEO) SatelliteIntegrated Communication and Navigation (ICAN)BeamformingCramer-Rao Bound (CRB)Convex OptimizationPhased ArrayChannel SubspaceSignal TransmissionJoint Optimization
Authors
Qi Wang, Xiaoming Chen, Qiao Qi, Zhaolin Wang, Yuanwei Liu
Abstract
This paper proposes a novel continuous aperture array (CAPA)-assisted integrated communication and navigation (ICAN) framework for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. Within this framework, an electromagnetic-based collaborative transmission model is developed, in which multiple satellites equipped with CAPAs simultaneously radiate downlink data streams and navigation reference signals over shared spectrum. Building upon this, the achievable communication rate and the navigation Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) are derived, which explicitly characterize the intrinsic coupling between the dual-function beamformers and system performance. To improve the positioning accuracy with communication quality of service guarantee, a joint beamforming optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average CRB subject to transmit power budgets and minimum rate constraints. To tackle the inherent infinite-dimensionality of the CAPA beamformer design, an ICAN channel subspace is introduced to equivalently transform the formulation into a tractable finite-dimensional problem, which is then efficiently solved via an iterative convex optimization algorithm. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed CAPA-assisted beamforming design algorithm significantly outperforms conventional discrete phased array architectures and other benchmark schemes, yielding notable improvements in ICAN performance.