SkyShare: Constellation-wide Sky Sharing for LEO-Radio Astronomy Coexistence

2026-09-01

AI Summary

为解决LEO星座与射电天文服务之间的频谱干扰问题，提出SkyShare系统，通过预测性波束调度和优化算法，在保护天文观测的同时保持网络覆盖。

Abstract

Rapidly growing low-Earth-orbit (LEO) constellations increasingly operate in the spectrum shared with radio astronomy services (RAS), creating escalating interference risks for sensitive scientific observations. Existing mitigation mechanisms rely on reactive beam steering, or avoidance near observatories but fail to account for aggregate sidelobe emissions-leading to residual interference and substantial, unnecessary capacity loss. We present SkyShare, a constellation-wide sky-sharing system that enables predictive, interference-aware spot beam scheduling to protect radio astronomy while preserving network coverage. SkyShare integrates high-fidelity orbital prediction with International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-compliant Equivalent Power Flux Density (EPFD) modeling, and real-time observatory data via Operational Data Sharing (ODS) to jointly optimize beam-cell assignments over observation windows. To make constellation-scale coordination tractable, we introduce a concept of EPFD-budgeted Region-of-Interest(RoI) that bounds residual sidelobe interference while confining optimization to a minimal, provably sufficient set of cells. Building on RoI, we formulate LEO-RAS coexistence as a scalable scheduling problem and design SkySched, a flow-based algorithm that is optimal in special cases and yields scalable near-optimal solutions in the general NP-hard setting. SkyShare operates entirely in the control plane and requires no satellite hardware changes. Using real Starlink constellation geometries, we evaluate SkyShare across 25 single-dish, Ku-band RAS sites worldwide. Compared to Starlink boresight avoidance, SkyShare reduces unserved cells by up to 90.68% while remaining within EPFD limits.

Problem

• LEO constellations
• radio astronomy services
• interference risks
• aggregate sidelobe emissions
• capacity loss

Innovation

• SkyShare
• EPFD-budgeted Region-of-Interest (RoI)
• SkySched algorithm
• Interference-aware scheduling
• Operational Data Sharing (ODS)