Adaptive Tracking for Beam Alignment between Ship-Borne Digital Phased-Array Antenna and LEO Satellite

In mobile satellite communication networks employing digital beam forming technology, beam alignment imposes great influence on link quality and network efficiency. Owing to complex coupling motion by low earth orbit (LEO) satellite and ship, direction of arrival (DOA) of target satellite varies rapidly and nonlinearly. It then causes difficulty to accurately track the DOA. In this work, an adaptive tracking algorithm is proposed by exploiting advantages of flexible parameter configuration of digital phased-array antenna. The alignment process basically consists of observation and tracking. In the observation stage, two-dimensional (2-D) multiple signal classification (MUSIC) is applied by the ship-borne digital phased-array antenna to estimate beam direction of satellite; in the tracking stage, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) based adaptive tracking is designed to achieve fast and accurate alignment. The proposed adaptive tracking improves performance by adaptively estimating tracking parameters in EKF firstly. The estimation results are then used as feedback to adaptively adjust digital phased-array antenna parameters to improve estimation accuracy of DOA. Simulation results under sea state 5 show that the proposed tracking algorithm improves tracking accuracy and stability over conventional ones.