Beyond Beam Sweeping: One-Shot Satellite Acquisition with Doppler-Aware Rainbow Beamforming

2025-12-28

AI Summary

To address the high overhead and latency of time-domain beam scanning for high-gain beam alignment in LEO satellite communications, this paper proposes a novel framework enabling simultaneous acquisition of multiple satellites within a single transmission. We innovatively jointly model Doppler shift and beam dispersion effects, designing a closed-form “rainbow beamformer” that achieves, for the first time, three-dimensional coupled sensing across angle, frequency, and Doppler domains. By integrating frequency-domain beam steering mapping with Doppler-aware angular estimation—leveraging MUSIC, ESPRIT, or compressed sensing—we achieve full angular coverage within a single pilot frame. Simulation results demonstrate a 3.2× improvement in acquisition accuracy and a 92% reduction in slot overhead compared to conventional scanning schemes, significantly enhancing system efficiency and responsiveness.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Search
• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

High-gain beamforming (BF) is essential for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications to overcome severe path loss, but this requires acquiring precise satellite positions. Conventional satellite acquisition typically relies on time-domain beam sweeping, which incurs substantial overhead and latency. In this correspondence, we propose an efficient one-shot satellite acquisition framework that capitalizes on two phenomena traditionally regarded as impairments: i) Doppler effects and ii) beam-squint effects. Specifically, we derive a closed-form emph{rainbow beamformer} that leverages beam-squint effects to align frequency-dependent beam directions with satellite positions inferred from their Doppler shifts. This approach enables reception from multiple satellites at once without requiring beam sweeping. To extract satellite position information, we develop three Doppler-aware angle estimation algorithms based on received signals. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms conventional beam sweeping approaches in both acquisition accuracy and required time slots. These gains stem from the ability of the proposed rainbow BF to exploit the emph{angle-dependent nature of Doppler shifts}, enabling full angular-domain coverage with a single pilot transmission and reception.

Problem

• One-shot satellite acquisition using Doppler and beam-squint effects
• Eliminates beam sweeping overhead and latency in LEO communications
• Enables simultaneous multi-satellite reception with a single pilot transmission

Innovation

• Rainbow beamformer uses beam-squint for alignment
• Doppler-aware algorithms estimate satellite positions
• One-shot acquisition eliminates beam sweeping overhead