Cooperative Communication for Cognitive Satellite Networks

A cooperative cognitive radio for satellite networks is considered, in which the primary network is a satellite network and the secondary network is a cellular network. Due to the lack of multipath in a satellite environment, the channel matrices of the satellite network are assumed to be rank-deficient, which implies that the capacity cannot be increased in proportion to the number of antennas. To overcome the rank deficiency, we propose a novel cooperative transmission strategy where the base station or mobile users in the cellular network both help the communication of the satellite network and transmit and receive their own streams. Not only does the secondary network carefully adjust the number of transmitted streams to avoid causing interference to the primary network beyond a certain threshold; it also provides alternative signal paths for the primary network, thereby effectively increasing the channel ranks of the primary network. We obtain both the achievable sum degrees of freedom (DoFs) and the sum rate under the proposed scheme, and we also derive upper bounds on the sum DoF. Using the analytical and numerical analysis, we show that our scheme significantly improves the overall system throughput compared with the satellite network alone, without cognitive access.

I. Introduction

Satellite communications have evolved to provide seamless connectivity and high data rate with wide coverage and high reliability [1]. Their inherent capabilities mean that satellite communications have an important role to play in fifth-generation (5G) communication systems, which are being standardized in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), with the intention to deploy commercially by 2020 [2], [3]. The aim of 5G is to support various usage scenarios such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine type communications (mMTC) [4]. In these scenarios, satellite communications can be used to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks and provide backhaul to networks. Satellites have other important roles in 5G, including off-loading terrestrial networks and providing reliable emergency communications [5]. Recent work has included the integration of satellite and terrestrial networks in 5G [5], [6]. A hybrid satellite-terrestrial network architecture was proposed based on control and user plane decoupling [6].